Removing do-while

Today in Dotty News: Martin has submitted a new PR, which removes support for the “do-while” construct — the “check the condition after the first loop” version of the traditional while loop.

The little language historian in me screams, “heresy!” — do-while is one of those stupid old features that I expect to find in every language with an imperative influence. But realistically, I think it’s probably the right thing to do. It’s rarely used (I’m not sure I’ve ever used it in Scala), it’s taking up syntax, and it’s not pulling its weight.

Moreover, as Martin shows in the discussion of the PR, it is entirely redundant: if you really need it, you can accomplish the same functionality with a somewhat weird-looking while loop.

So I’m broadly in favor of this simplification (let’s all remember: one of the major goals of Dotty is to simplify where possible), but if you have an opinion or want to see the details, head over to the PR.

And the usual caveat: this is just a pull request, not yet merged to Dotty master — there’s a lot of discussion yet to come before this might show up in Scala 3.