Ban the dangling else!

I was just reading through Niklaus Wirth's paper, "Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass" (found through Lambda the Ultimate, of course!) where he talks about the Dangling Else problem.

Some programming languages have statements of the form:

if X then Y

and

if X then Y else Z

with no end keyword or bracket, leading to the problem of how to interpret:

if it's Saturday then if it's sunny then have a picnic else see a movie

Do we see a movie if it's not Saturday, or if it is Saturday, but it's cloudy?

Natural languages have exactly the same sort of problem (example from the AP Press Guide to News Writing, quoted in Language Log):

We spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows playing Scrabble and reading.

It reads funny in English, but we resolve it easily because we know the context. Obviously context is not as helpful for a compiler.

How does Language Log suggest fixing that problem in English? They give two suggestions:

We spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows, playing Scrabble and reading.

or

Playing Scrabble and reading, we spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows.

The first suggestion corresponds approximately to Wirth's preference for an end keyword; the comma signals a break of some kind, and the obvious interpretation is that the cows and the scrabble shouldn't be too closely associated. It's not nearly so rigorous as end, of course.

The other suggestion is a bit more interesting; they rework the entire ordering of the sentence. Although the two examples aren't really parallel, it does suggest another way to rework our if-then-if-then-else, if we intend the final else to correspond to the first if-then:

if it's not Saturday then see a movie else if it's sunny then have a picnic.

In other words, we're punting -- not solving the original ambiguity but wording around to avoid the issue.

I think that's actually a better strategy from a human reader's standpoint. We do not have much in the way of "closing braces" in natural language: they tend to lead to center embedding issues which our brains just aren't equipped to deal with. So maybe a good policy would be for a compiler to simply disallow the "if-then-if-then-else" construction with either interpretation, and force the user to rework their logic a little. Such a restriction looks like an ugly hack to a computer scientist, but I think its necessary if we take seriously the idea that programs should be human languages as well as computer languages.

Tags: language, Programming Languages, HCI, dangling modifiers