Re: Switch/Case statements revisited

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > Norman Ramsey <nr@eecs.harvard.edu> writes:
 > > Since Lua's syntax was inspired by Pascal
 > 
 > To me, Lua's syntax looks more like it was inspired by CLU (a very nice
 > language, btw)...

Interesting.  I'm a big fan.  Certainly the semicolons-are-optional
statement terminator is straight out of CLU.

CLU's case statement is the elimination construct for the built-in
variant record clusters.  It is roughly

  tagcase <expression>
     tag <name>, ... : statements
     ...
     others : statements
  end

Not so well suited to Lua since one would want a case statement to
apply to any Lua value.  But as usual they've done a good job of
eliminating syntactically noisy curly braces and vertical bars (at the
cost of syntactically noisy keywords.

The same structure might be pleasant enough with more Lua-like keywords.  
Here's a proposal extending the 5.1 reference grammar on page 95.
Bold is keywords, curlies are zero-or-more, brackets are zero-or-one:

  *case* exp
    { *is* explist1 : block }
    [ *otherwise* : block ]
  *end*

Norman