A New Statement for Selection and Exception Handling in Imperative Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified selection statement for imperative languages, simplifying control flow by sequentially executing the first successful statement among multiple options, thereby unifying common selection constructs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel unifying selection statement, seqor, that consolidates if-then-else, switch, and try-catch into a single, simple semantics.

Findings

Simplifies control flow in imperative languages.

Provides a clear semantics for the seqor statement.

Examples demonstrate practical application.

Abstract

Diverse selection statements -- if-then-else, switch and try-catch -- are commonly used in modern programming languages. To make things simple, we propose a unifying statement for selection. This statement is of the form seqor(G_1,...,G_n) where each $G_i$ is a statement. It has a a simple semantics: sequentially choose the first successful statement $G_i$ and then proceeds with executing $G_i$. Examples will be provided for this statement.