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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

Damn, this is fantastic. One big syntactical thing I should really put in a proposal for is null-conditional returns. Turning

    if(foo != null) return foo;

Into

    return? foo;

It fits perfectly with the existing null coalescing operators and such, while really cleaning up a lot of code.

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This look so very prone to cause bugs. Why would you even "return if not null"? I don't think I've been in this situation before. What I do see is if x is null then return something else, but this never

I think return is too important a keyword to make optional like that. However, I could totally get behind a shortening like

if(?foo){return null}

An interesting idea; it could be extended to other constructs - assignments, method calls... Also, imagine having something like this:

  while (!return? foo) {
    foo = get_foo();
  }

Oh please not. Hiding complexity is dangerous.

I'm confused. In the first code block, what value is returned if foo is equal to null?

If it returns null, what's the difference between:

>return foo;

and

>return? foo;

I am surprised that hasn't been done already.

Better not.

Perl# basically.

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