Simpler Conditional Testing

Submitted by alanhogan on July 20, 2006 - 11:35am. Conversation | Code | Code | Programming | Ruby

With all the recent talk and buzz surrounding the unsurprising Ruby programming language, I couldn‚Äôt help but think about other ways to simplify programming. Consider the following:

if (foo == bar, baz, "faz")

Why not use syntax like that featured above to mean "If foo equals bar, or foo equals baz, or foo equals the string 'faz'"?

This would be equivalent to this common way of testing one variable against multiple values:

if (foo == bar || foo == baz || foo == "faz")

I think such a syntax would jive perfectly with Ruby's DRY (Don‚Äôt Repeat Yourself) principle, which essentially prefers as little code repetition as possible, and with its parallel assignment. And of course, I would love to see this implemented in other languages, too.

What do you think?

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