That way your code actually looks like "loop reading commands until you get a non-empty one and loop doing that until a 'quit' is requested". Not, "here is a block that I may or may not be using as a loop (please parse the rest of the block if you want to know), read a command, goto the top of the nearest surrounding loop (or naked block but not a conditional or do block) if the command is empty, otherwise go to the continue block (if there is one) or the top of the nearest surrounding loopish block, if a 'quit' was not requested". (:

And for that, you use a "here's a do, please parse till the end to see whether I want to include a file, I want to turn a block into an expression or I want to use a looping construct"?

At least with a bare block you know you have a looping construct. With do you can have 3 totally different things. On top of that, several of your examples nest dos. I can understand that some people find bare blocks confusing - I indicated you could use a while(1) in front of it - but I fail to see that nested do constructs are easier than a bare block.

I would think that the major "problem" with my bare block is that the guard is at the end - but your do { } until suffers from the same problem.

Here's how I read my block:

• print prompt.
• read line and chomp it.
• try again if there are no non-blanks.
• execute command and repeat if we don't quit.

More or less the same as you would explain things in English. And isn't that what's a major design principle Larry uses for Perl? (Note that my next should have been a redo).

-- Abigail

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