Is there a language that breaks out of conditional statements as soon as they become false? - programming-languages

Question

I thought that I had come across this before, but I can't remember when or what language it was.
Basically if I have the following in C#:
someCondition = true
if(someCondition)
{
// Do Something
if(anotherCond) {
someCondition = false;
continue;
}
// Do Something Else
}
In C# this will break out of the body of the if statement when someCondition changes, meaning that //DO Something Else only gets processed if someCondition doesn't change...
Is there a language that will do the interior if statement checking/continue automatically i.e. be able to write:
someCondition = true
if(someCondition)
{
// Do Something
if(anotherCond){
someCondition = false;
}
// Do Something Else
}
with the same behaviors as the previous? Obviously there are multiple ways to get this behavior in every language conceivable, what I am interested in is if there is a language that by design has this functionality.
Edit: Reduced the examples so hopefully people can see what is happening, when someCondition changes (i.e. the condition that the if statement relied on to begin, we should break out of the remaining if statement. I am not looking for a way to do this in C#, or any particular language, but for a language that does this automatically.

Answer 1

You can create a property in C# that throws an exception on any condition you set, aka truth=true. The exception will break out of the loop to wherever you have your catch.
An example in C#:
public class MyException : Exception { }
public bool truth
{
get { return _truth; }
set
{
_truth = value;
if(value)
throw new MyException();
}
}
bool _truth;

Answer 2

I think you can simulate what you want in C# like so:
void ExecuteWhile( Func<bool> condition,
IEnumerable<Action> executeWhileTrue,
IEnumerable<Action> executeWhileFalse)
{
if (condition())
{
foreach (Action action in executeWhileTrue)
{
action();
if (!condition())
return;
}
}
else
{
foreach (Action action in executeWhileFalse)
{
action();
if (condition())
return;
}
}
}
and then use it as such:
truth = true;
while (true) // loop forever
{
ExecuteWhile( () => truth,
new List<Action> { () => { /* do something that might set truth to false*/},
() => { /* do something else*/}},
new List<Action> { () => { /* do something that might set truth to true*/},
() => { /* do something else*/}});
}
And to answer your question: no, I don't think there is a language with this as a build-in feature.

Answer 3

As far as I understood, the following is wanted:
if (cond) {
A;
B;
C;
}
shall behave as if written thus:
if (cond) {
A;
if (cond) {
B;
if (cond) {
C
}
}
}
IMHO, this would be a silly feature, unlikely to be implemented in any language except maybe in INTERCAL.
Why do I think that?
Well, suppose someone wants to refactor the code and moves B;C to a subroutine.
if (cond) {
A;
BC();
}
subroutine BC() { B;C }
The block - according to our feature - will mean as before:
if (cond) {
A;
if (cond) BC();
}
But what about our subroutine? The language designer has 2 choices here:
Treat the call BC() as atomic, i.e. in the subroutine, the
condition cond is not checked before statement C. This would mean
such a simple refactoring would change the meaning of the program
drastically.
Somehow pass the information that every statement must be guarded
with cond to the subroutine so that the behaviour of our block remains
unchanged. This, of course, leads to the silly situation that the
behaviour of any subroutine would depend upon the context it was
called in. A subroutine with n atomic statements would have n possible ways to behave even if it had no arguments and would not use non local mutable state explicitely, depending on how many of the statements would be actually executed. (Note that nowadays the trend is to minimize the most often harmful effects of shared non-local state. OO languages do it with encapsulation, FP languages by banning mutable state altogether.)
In any case, no matter how the language designer decides, we would have a feature that is the direct contradiction of the principle of the least surprise. It is clear that programs in such a language would be utterly hard to maintain.

Answer 4

If you broke you big bunch if/else statements into succinct little methods which tested each little piece of the puzzle, you could rely on the compilers short circuit boolean evaluation
I'm not sure if that helps as your example is a big vague. You don't say if you're doing any processing or if it's just a bunch of checks. Either way, breaking your code into smaller methods may help you out.

Answer 5

You can use a do..while loop:
do
{
} while (truth == true);
thats if i've understood correctly!

Answer 6

You say while true... but while what is true. I would think your loop will run infinitely regardless of the language used. Assuming true will be a real condition... I would say just set the exit condition in one of the if blocks. You question is a bit hard to understand. Also the continue is unnecessary.