“Quiet” syntax

Today in Dotty News: Martin has just submitted a PR for a feature he’s been talking up for quite a while, which he is now referring to as “quiet” syntax.

See the PR for more information, but the high concept is that, instead of saying:

if (x == 2)
  doSomeStuff

you could instead say:

if x == 2 then
  doSomeStuff

There’s a lot more to it, but the general notion is to allow you to drop parentheses and instead use keywords to delimit control flow.

I confess, I kind of hate this one — I find parens and curlies much easier to scan than I do keywords. But there are certainly folks who like this sort of syntax, and as far as I know it’s just being presented as an option. If you have thoughts, I recommend checking out the PR.

Edited to Add: in comments, Martin says that this is not intended to just be an alternative — he would like to deprecate the existing Scala syntax and replace it. So this is potentially one of the larger Dotty changes: I recommend taking a look.

Usual caveat: this is a new PR, not in Dotty master much less a formal Scala 3 proposal. Take it with an appropriate grain of salt…