Hi everyone,

Since the mandatory else section for case blocks isn't going anywhere, I would like to make a small request:

Whenever I come across a section of code in my own projects where "*else *;" is necessary, or any empty branch for that matter, I put a "{ Do nothing }" comment just to make it absolutely clear that the block is there deliberately and so there isn't any confusion with the syntax on first viewing; e.g:

*case *... *of*
*else*
     { Do nothing };
*end*;

(I just hope the e-mail formatting doesn't remove the indentation!)

Just a minor thing, but I'm wondering if that's a sensible request for the compiler source.

Gareth aka. Kit

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Sorry, I didn't mean to post my reply to the core list.

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I do like things to be documented so there's no guesswork with that.  Admittedly some of the standards seem to be more designed for projects written in C and C++, like identifiers all being in lowercase, whereas Pascal, or at least Delphi, traditionally had the start of every word capitalised (e.g. TCriticalSection instead of tcriticalsection).

I do put spaces before and after operators (e.g. "X := 5" instead of
"X:=5") because that is how I started my life as a Turbo Pascal and
Delphi 2.0 programmer, but if the compiler coding standards tell me
otherwise, then I'll do the no-space style.

Personally I would say that the most readable styles should be championed, but that's just me.

Gareth aka. Kit

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On a more general scale, it seems like it might be a reasonable spot for an actual new case-block-specific keyword? I can't imagine it would be an insurmountable task to do something like make the literal word "nothing" (followed by a semicolon) act as "sugar" in the context of case blocks for what a lone semicolon normally does.

For example:

type TSomeEnum = (A, B, C, D);
case BlahBlah() of
  A: DoThingForA();
  B: DoThingForB();
  C: nothing;
  D: DoThingForD();
end;

I personally disagree with that one because it's just fluff, considering that "nothing" is equivalent to "{ nothing }" - usually a keyword or an intrinsic should actually do something.

Gareth aka. Kit

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