From: Jim Weirich <jweirich@...>
Date: 2002-12-05T21:29:26+09:00
Subject: Re: elseif?

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 00:53, Paul J. Sanchez wrote:
> >>>>> "Shannon" == Shannon Fang <xrfang@hotmail.com> writes:
> 
>     Shannon> Hi, I just happend to find out that the "elseif" in ruby
>     Shannon> is spelled as "elsif". Can anyone, probably Matz, tell me
>     Shannon> if there's any "historical" reason? :)
> 
> That was the thing I found most jarring about Ruby, too.  Not being a
> Perl programmer, "elsif" violated the principal of least surprise for
> me.  

It seems like every language makes a different choice in this matter. 
I've seen all of the following in various different languages...

   else if
   elseif
   elsif
   elif

I can never remember which variation goes with which language.  If I
recall correctly, Eiffel changed from on spelling to another, making it
very interesting to type in code from an older tutorial and finding
syntax errors.

I'm for leaving this one alone in Ruby.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich     jweirich@one.net    http://w3.one.net/~jweirich
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, 
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)