Re: \if, \elseif, \else, \endif (was Re: PSQL commands: \quit_if, \quit_unless)

>
>
> On reflection, it seems fairly improbable to me that people would use
> \if and friends interactively. They're certainly useful for scripting,
> but would you really type commands that you know are going to be ignored?
>

I'm thinking the one use-case is where a person is debugging a
non-interactive script, cuts and pastes it into an interactive script, and
then scrolls through command history to fix the bits that didn't work. So,
no, you wouldn't *type* them per se, but you'd want the session as if you
had. The if-then barking might really be useful in that context.

>
> Therefore, I don't think we should stress out about fitting branching
> activity into the prompts. That's just not the use-case. (Note: we
> might well have to reconsider that if we get looping, but for now it's
> not a problem.) Moreover, if someone is confused because they don't
> realize they're inside a failed \if, it's unlikely that a subtle change in
> the prompt would help them. So your more in-the-face approach of printing
> messages seems good to me.
>

Glad you like the barking. I'm happy to let the prompt issue rest for now,
we can always add it later.

If we DID want it, however, I don't think it'll be hard to add a special
prompt (Thinking %T or %Y because they both look like branches, heh), and
it could print the if-state stack, maybe something like:

\if true
\if true
\if false
\if true

With a prompt1 of '%T> ' Would then resolve to

ttfi>

for true, true, false, ignored.

This is just idle musing, I'm perfectly happy to leave it out entirely.

> This seems more or less reasonable, although:
>
> > # \endif
> > active \endif, executing commands
>
> looks a bit weird. Maybe instead say "exited \if, executing commands"?
>

+1

>
> BTW, what is your policy about nesting these things in include files?
> My immediate inclination is that if we hit EOF with open \if state,
> we should drop it and revert to the state in the surrounding file.
> Otherwise things will be way too confusing.
>

That's how it works now if you have ON_ERROR_STOP off, plus an error
message telling you about the imbalance. If you have ON_ERROR_STOP on, it's
fatal.

All \if-\endif pairs must be balanced within a file (well, within a
MainLoop, but to the user it looks like a file). Every new file opened via
\i or \ir starts a new if-stack. Because commands in an inactive branch are
never executed, we don't have to worry about the state of the parent stack
when we do a \i, because we know it's trues all the way down.

We chose this not so much because if-endif needed it (we could have thrown
it into the pset struct just as easily), but because of the issues that
might come up with a \while loop: needing to remember previous GOTO points
in a file (if the input even *is* a file...) is going to be hard enough,
remembering them across files would be harder, and further complicated by
the possibility that a file \included on one iteration might not be
included on the next (or vice versa)...and like you said, way too confusing.