Re: Loops (was Re: do { quit; } else { })

On 20/04/2025 12:00, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 19.04.2025 23:52, Michael S wrote:

On Sat, 19 Apr 2025 13:55:02 -0700
Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:

>
Again, I would not object to adding a new kind of for loop,
similar to what you would prefer, and visually distinct from the
existing for loop, in a new version of the C standard.  But that's
not likely to happen because there doesn't seem to be much demand
for it (for reasons that I know make you angry), and I don't care
enough to write a proposal.  If someone else does write a proposal,
I'll be glad to help out by nitpicking it.
>
[...]

>
I don't believe that such proposal can be accepted.
If I was a member, I'd certainly vote against it.

 Exactly 19 days ago I'd even have written such a proposal, and,
fitting to the calendar date, of course I'd have used a distinct
name for the feature; 'for_losers(var,expr,expr[,expr])'.

This is quite telling in that:
(1) You regard the idea of desiring such a feature as a joke
(2) You consider those who'd like to use it as 'losers'
Just such a feature seems to be the primary style of 'for' in languages such as Ada, Python, Modern Fortran, Odin, Ruby, Julia, Rust, Matlab, Algol68, Euphoria, Ocaml, Logo, Nim, PL/I, Haxe, Lua, ....
Even Bash has it. All losers?
Interestingly, so does BCPL: you may be aware that C was influenced by B, which itself was supposed to be influenced by BCPL. So what the hell happened?

BTW, a more serious question. Would a change of the "C" language
have syntax constructs with such _optional_ components?

Why is that a big deal?
C's 'for' already has optional parts, although the semicolons need to be present. Do you mean allowing the comma in your example to be optional as well as the expression?