AutoHotkey Community

BUG? Or by design?

You cannot do (inside a function):
While needs a space before the open bracket:

Note from Chris: I added the poll on 9/27/2009.

All commands require a delimiter (space/tab/comma) to distinguish them from functions. Functions may not have a delimiter between the function name and the "(".
And this should not be in bug reports! You (apparently) are a new ahk user and should not consider all problems to be bugs, but a lack of experince/understanding. Consider posting problems in ask for help, then if a bug is confirmed, post it here.

if() doesn't

Yes very new. A_ParamCount - to retrieve the number of PASSED parameters
And barely/if any "commands" require spaces.
oror
In fact, in over a year, while() is the first internal command that has choked on a lack of a space.

And Bite me.

If you are going to rely on undocumented behavior, expect to have lots of problems. While the documentation does not specifically state that keywords must be separated, I challenge you to find any example or case in the help file that suggests that delimiters are not needed.
Ok, I'll sink to your level of maturity.
Bite yourself

Yes, I have read the helpfile. Have You?

Almost every function in there, is shown without "whitespace" between functionname and brackets.

Perhaps you might find [Contents]
+ Functions
...+ Math

or, GetKeyState, listed under + Keyboard Control
and usage listed as:
or perhaps, DllCall, listed under + Misc Commands:
or perhaps, all of the functions listed under + String Management, that accept brackets in their usage.

So again, I ask, is the requirement of whitespace in "while (x)", a BUG or by Design?

While is not a function. Notice that it can't be positioned arbitrarily in a statement. And AHK's functions can't have space(s) between name and opening parenthesis, due to the implicit concatenation in AHK. Anyway, I noticed this myself a while ago. It can be confusing to some users as the following works on the contrary.

And, I think there is a side-effect of this, which is not good IMO.

@Sean, yes and neither is "if()"

While is part of the "flow of control", "While ()" and "if() || if ()" appear to be the only Control Commands/Statements that accept brackets.

There has been discussion of For() being added. And a furthering of most commands being functionally() callable.

I can certainly add a space after a While statement. It just seems more than odd that it is required to.

I was neutral on this, but now I agree with you. See my last example.

I was leery of trying that, thought it might spam messageBox'es out of control heh. Instead x gets assigned 3...
whereas, this:

Yes, the problem is that an user may create inadvertently a function instead a loop. I suppose that it's a consequence of following the syntax of Loop, not that of If. Notice that you can also use like

It is by design.
'If' is not a command per se. It is used in syntax very distinct from commands; keywords are used to both delimit the arguments and determine what action/command it actually is:
From a "purely implementation" perspective, IF() is only allowed because an exception is specifically made for it when determining whether the line begins with a function call or definition:
Supporting While() seems to be a simple matter of adding an exception for it:
return (%MyVar%) is one example given in the help file.
Loop (*) is a valid file loop, matching any filenames beginning with ( and ending with ).
Any argument which accepts text or an expression can legitimately begin with ( and end with ).


To clarify my point of view: it is by design, but designs can and sometimes should be changed.

Btw, none of the examples in the help file surround a While's expression with parentheses.

Right; I thought it was for backwards compatibility: prior scripts may have used While() as a function, and Chris didn't want to break them.

Too much concern backwards can block progressing. I wonder how ended in choosing name like InStr then.

Changing "While()" to be recognized as a loop rather than a function would not only break any existing script that uses "while" as a function name, it would break it in a way that is likely to cause infinite loops.

On the other hand, using "while" as a function seems extremely rare. Hopefully anyone who does so will read the changelog.

So I agreed changing this seems justified, especially since many who know other languages are in the habit of writing if() and while().

So unless there are any objections, it will be changed in the next release.

Thanks.

hi chris, i support the change