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Sure you can!
Shakespeare used 'else' in the same sense as 'otherwise': https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/GlossaryHeadword.as...
"else used as a conjunction" https://wordtype.org/of/else
"Or else!" was common speech before computers, and a common vague cartoon/cowboy/sign threat.
I remember there was a paper that tried to compare natural language usage of common programming language keywords to see if they may come up with other constructs to create a programming language that is easier to learn as your first one. There were a few interesting observations. The one that stuck with me the most is that 'and' is most commonly used with almost the opposite sense in natural language vs programming:…
Great observations. In the same idea, "or" is inclusive in all of programming and CS, i.e. A and B => A or B, but in natural languages (as least the ones I know) "or" is almost always exclusive, i.e "do you want to eat pizza or pasta?" does not imply that eating both is an option. This is of course related to why the famous joke "Is it a boy or a girl? Yes." is so hilarious.
You have to be very careful in reasoning about natural language based solely on the written record, since spoken language regularly includes features, such as the suprasegmentals (stress and intonation) in the above examples, that aren't recorded in the orthography.
I remember there was a paper that tried to compare natural language usage of common programming language keywords to see if they may come up with other constructs to create a programming language that is easier to learn as your first one. There were a few interesting observations. The one that stuck with me the most is that 'and' is most commonly used with almost the opposite sense in natural language vs programming:…
Wasn't that the goal of Perl? It was inspired from natural language first, not inspired from another programming language first. This is why it's so quick and easy to prototype in it, arguably far easier than any other language. I believe it is the only programming language to be inspired from natural language first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having taught programming to novices a little, I believe “if not” is clearer than “else”. Imagining “not” being prepended to the original conditional expression would be natural, especially in languages with “not X” construct (like Python), and it’s easy to forget that “else” is in fact archaic to non-programmer ears, slightly and possibly needlessly raising the barrier. if (X) { doY(); } if not /* X is implied */ {…
I wonder whether anyone has used "otherwise" for this. It'd be a simple alias for "else", but it'd certainly sound natural: if (X) { doY(); } otherwise { doZ(); }
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language)
I remember there was a paper that tried to compare natural language usage of common programming language keywords to see if they may come up with other constructs to create a programming language that is easier to learn as your first one. There were a few interesting observations. The one that stuck with me the most is that 'and' is most commonly used with almost the opposite sense in natural language vs programming:…
The word “and” in English is simply there to join multiple clauses together. Whether it is a set union or set intersection, (or some other relations) depends on the sentence. Set union: they can read and write’ Set intersection: my jeans were creased and dirty Sequential: he turned round and walked out Causal: there was a flash flood and by the next morning the town was under water’ And, there are many more usages.
It begs the question: did we search and find the answer of if-then-else, or did we find an answer that was sufficiently likeable and usable- but one of many possibilities? How do we know whether this choice was the global optimum vs a local one? Is if-then-else the electron- a deep truth waiting to be discovered- or the gasoline powered car- an option we explored for decades among others options.
For languages that don't support pattern matching or passing in functions as values, "if" is probably the best you can do with. You might be able to do something with boolean short-circuit operators but it's debatable if that that is better than the if statement.
In React, if you are using JSX, they don't have "if" statements within the markup they just use the boolean short-circuit (&&) operator.
For more ML style languages that support pattern matching, it is often easier to express solutions that way than with traditional if statements. In those situations I would say that "if" is less desirable in terms of expressive power and code readability.
Also, "if / else" only supports 2 cases, with pattern matching you can have an arbitrary amount of cases.
Without pattern matching, expressing more than 2 cases becomes a combination of nested if statements combined with "&&" and "||" expressions. This makes it much harder to read and write.
The story of development is interesting, but I doubt that the concept itself needed invention. Even in machine language using nothing but conditional branching the pattern would have appeared enough to be an idiom perhaps without a name: ... b? addr1 ...else stuff jmp addr2 addr1: ...then stuff addr2: ...always stuff What's more interesting is the generalization to any boolean expression, not the naming/placement of…
What did blow me away was seeing a function for the first time.
It begs the question: did we search and find the answer of if-then-else, or did we find an answer that was sufficiently likeable and usable- but one of many possibilities? How do we know whether this choice was the global optimum vs a local one? Is if-then-else the electron- a deep truth waiting to be discovered- or the gasoline powered car- an option we explored for decades among others options.
Is pattern matching a generalization of if/then/else, a reframing of it, or something else entirely?
Interesting timing. I just read https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1728174 due to r/programming https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kbs11a/a_damn_... yesterday. Apparently Cambridge Programming Language (more or less a failed language that became proto-C) designer Christopher Strachey had some misgivings about this usage of "else".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder whether anyone has used "otherwise" for this. It'd be a simple alias for "else", but it'd certainly sound natural: if (X) { doY(); } otherwise { doZ(); }
Towards the bottom of the article there is a example of MAD[0] that uses something similar, and there is also the John McCarthy proposal which also uses otherwise. I could imagine it being used in a language that had a tight connection to maths as otherwise is often used there. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language)