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From: Ethan Furman on 16 Apr 2010 17:53
> There's no RightAnswer(tm), just our best guess as to what is the most
> useful behavior for the most number of people.

+1 QOTW
From: Steven D'Aprano on 17 Apr 2010 18:39
On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:23:45 +0200, Alain Ketterlin wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano <steve(a)REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
>
>> On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:05:03 +0200, Alain Ketterlin wrote:
>>
>>>> I don't know of any language that creates a new scope for loop
>>>> variables, but perhaps that's just my ignorance...
>>>
>>> I think Pascal and Modula-2 do this, Fortran does this, as well as
>>> Ada.
>>
>> Pascal doesn't do this.
> [...]
>> for i := 1 to 3 do
>> begin
>> writeln(i);
>> end;
>> writeln(i);
> [...]
>
> At http://standardpascal.org/iso7185.html#6.8.3.9%20For-statements
> (sorry, I didn't find a more readable version), I read (second
> paragraph, fourth sentence) :
>
> "After a for-statement is executed, other than being left by a
> goto-statement, the control-variable shall be undefined."
>
> So, at least, the compiler should emit a warning.

None of my Pascal text books mention this behaviour, and gpc doesn't emit
a warning by default. Possibly there is some option to do so.

Stardard Pascal isn't as useful as non-standard Pascal. This was one of
the reasons for the (in)famous article "Pascal Considered Harmful" back
in the 1980s(?).


>> However you can't assign to the loop variable inside the loop. Outside
>> of the loop, it is treated as just an ordinary variable and you can
>> assign to it as usual.
>
> I read the excerpt above as: you have to re-assign to it before using
> it.
>
> The corner-case is obvious: if the loop body is not executed at all, you
> cannot assume the "control-variable" will have the first value. I'm
> curious to know what gets printed if you swap 1 and 3 in the above code.

When I try it, i is initialised to 0. That either means that gpc zeroes
integers when they're declared, or the value it just randomly happened to
pick up was 0 by some fluke. I'm guessing the first is more likely.


--
Steven
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