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After coding in Ruby for four years now, it’s finally beginning to dawn on me how syntactically awful some traditional control structures are. The worst of which is the for loop!!

I mean look at this!

 for ( i = 0; i < strlen( poem ); i++ ) {
   printf( "%d", poem[i] );
 }

I have used this structure almost daily—and I’m sure it ultimately averages out to daily—for like a decade. Which is definitely evidence of its usefulness. But the triple expression, consisting of initiator, terminator, and incrementor, is truly hideous.

What blows my mind is that, though some of C’s legacy doesn’t carry on, this structure pervades PHP, Perl, Java and other C offspring. On the other hand, I wonder how I would feel about the syntax if more control structures used this kind of multiple expression setup.