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Comment by epage | Hacker News Reader

I think the switch statement design is a foot gun: defaults to fall-through when empty and break when there is a body.

https://c3-lang.org/language-overview/examples/#enum-and-swi...

This feels very natural though, in a "principle of least surprise" kinda way. This is what you'd expect a properly designed switch statement to do.

Least surprise to who? Are there any other mainstream languages that behave this way?

I think consistency is the best correlate of least surprise, so having case statements that sometimes fall though, sometimes not, seems awful.

Swift

Sadly many of us are so used to the C fall-through behavior that this would be quite a surprise.

Personally, I'd rather see a different syntax switch (perhaps something like the Java pattern switch) or no switch at all than one that looks the same as in all C-style languages but works just slightly differently.

It reads naturally but I can see people getting tripped up writing this. Worse for changing existing code. Refactor in a way that removes a body? Likely forget to add a breake

If I aimed and shot a gun at my foot and a bullet didn’t go through it, I would trash the gun.

To be fair, I would probably toss the gun away if a bullet went through my foot.

Er, Forth guy as a, would foot trash I the and bullet gun the. Word!

I agree it's not the best choice. I mean it's true that you almost always want fall-through when the body is empty and break where it isn't but maybe it would be better to at least require explicit break (or fall-through keyword) and just make it a compiler error if one is missing and the body is not empty. That would be the least surprising design imo.

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