Re: return

[Chong Yidong]

Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:

> This (very limited) test indicates that adding built-in support for
> block, return, and return-from should have little performance impact.
> (Though the block tags ought to use a specialized obarray instead of
> what cl-macs.el does, which is to intern them as "--cl-block-%s--".)
>
> Does anyone see a deeper problem with providing such functions?

Thinking about this some more, I do see a couple of snags.  First, the
`dotimes' and `dolist' macros use `while' internally, so if we introduce
a built-in `return' that exits from `while', it's hard to make that same
`return' exit correctly from `dotimes'/`dolist'.  One solution might be
to introduce something like `while-noblock' and use that in `dotimes'
and `dolist'.

Also, block tags should have lexical scope, so in order to implement
`block' properly we probably ought to wait for the lexical binding
changes.  I think it is currently possible to implement `return' for
exiting unnamed blocks, and leave `block'/`return-from' for the future,
but I dunno if doing it like that is worth our while.