Otherwise

I was thinking of a a new syntactic sugar: "Otherwise". It would allow this situation: In a method, we want to run through some lines of code, testing predicates and running code as we go, with the stipulation that it should be possible that one or more of the predicates are valid, and the code should be able to run any of the valid branches. This can't be done with if-else's, since in those cases only one of the branches get run. And switch() won't work because it isn't built to allow one *or more* of the branches to be followed. At the end of the method, we want to run some code if the preceeding stuff never ran, that is, if all the preceeding predicates were false.

For example, if A is true, run the A command, if B is true, run the B command, if C is true, run the C command, if none of those were true, run the D command.

method () {             method () {
  temp_flag=false        <
  if A:                     if A:
    temp_flag=true       <   
    A_command()                 A_command()
  if B:                     if B:
    temp_flag=true       <   
    B_command()                B_command()
  if C:                     if C:
    temp_flag=true       <   
    C_command()                C_command()
  if (temp_flag=false):  |   otherwise:
    D_command()                  D_command()
}                           }

We carry along information on whether all of the previous "if" statements were false. If they were, we can go into the "otherwise" statement.

we can use short-cicuit evaluation to benefit here. What that means is that as soon as some particular piece of logic is definite and further evaluation is redundant, the computer stops processing it.

For our situation, the following code would suffice, although it is not as expressive. We want short-circuiting, so we want the first part (the part containing the first three functions) to cause us to skip "otherwise". In an AND operator, if the first element is false then we can skip evaluation of subsequent logic. So we have to figure out how to make the first part evaluate to false if any one of the first three functions returns true.

!(A() || B() || C()) 
	&& otherwise()

Given a method definition like:

A() {
	if a_makes_sense:
		go_on_a_walk();
		return true;
	else
		return false;
}