One of my favorite things about Lisp and Smalltalk is that they don’t have special syntax for control structures. Sometimes the most elegant way to express a solution to a problem requires a unique flow control construct. Beyond that, there’s something appealingly minimal about a language that doesn’t have a fixed set of hardcoded magic keywords.

Unfortunately, languages like Lisp and Smalltalk that have this feature typically marry it to a syntax that looks strange to the large number of the world’s programmers who were weaned on C and other curly brace languages. To explore a couple of a ideas, I started tinkering on a little interpreted language called Finch. Here, I’ll try to explain how I addressed the build-your-own-control-flow problem while (I hope) keeping the syntax relatively readable to most people.

A Smalltalk Primer

Finch is inspired directly by Smalltalk (by way of Self), so it’ll help to review how Smalltalk handles control flow before we get to Finch. If you know Smalltalk, feel free to skip this.

Let’s consider a fairly boring chunk of code in a curly language:

if ( numWeasels > numCakes ) { print ( "Not enough cakes!" ); } else { for ( int i = 0 ; i < numWeasels ; i ++ ) { print ( "A weasel eats a cake!" ); } }

We’ve got three keywords there: if , else , and for . Here’s how that code would look in Smalltalk:

numWeasels > numCakes ifTrue: [ "Not enough cakes!" print ] ifFalse: [ i := 0 . [ i < numWeasels ] whileTrue: [ "A weasel eats a cake!" print . i := i + 1 ] ]

Whoa, what? First, we’ll gloss over the basic stuff we don’t care about here: . is used to separate statements, := is for assignment, and the function (method) comes after the argument instead of before.

The control flow part of that code is this:

... ifTrue: [ ... ] ifFalse: [ [ ... ] whileTrue: [ ... ] ]

You may think that all we’ve done is simple replacement: curlies become square brackets, if becomes ifTrue: , etc. Not so fast. ifTrue: , IfFalse: , and whileTrue: aren’t reserved words in Smalltalk. They aren’t special at all, in fact: you could implement them in Smalltalk itself if you wanted to. Here’s how:

An if/then construct is basically a “procedure” that takes three arguments: a boolean condition to check, a block of code to execute if the condition is true and (optionally) a block to execute if the condition is false. If you were to declare a “function” for if/then in C, it would look like:

void IfThen ( bool condition , code ifTrue , code ifFalse );

The problem, of course, is that code isn’t a type in C: there’s no easy way to pass around a reference to a chunk of code outside of function pointers. Smalltalk doesn’t have that problem– it has blocks.

That’s what the square brackets are doing in the original example. They create a block: a chunk of unevaluated code encapsulated as an object. If you do this:

[ "hi" print ]

It doesn’t print “hi”. Instead, it creates an object representing that chunk of code. If you then call the block by sending it a value message:

[ "hi" print ] value

Then it will print the string. Of course, you don’t have to call a block immediately, or at all. You can store it in a variable, pass it to another function, call it repeatedly, etc.

The other piece of syntax to understand is Smalltalk’s notion of a “keyword”. In most languages, keywords are reserved words built into the language. In Smalltalk, keywords are just another kind of user-defined function like regular method calls or operators. Keywords are identified by ending the name with a colon ( : ). They’re used in Smalltalk to send messages to objects with multiple arguments. Where in C you would do AddKeyValue(dictionary, "key", "value") , in Smalltalk you’d say dictionary addKey: "key" value: "value" .

Now we can understand how the original Smalltalk code works. numWeasels > numCakes is an expression that returns a boolean value. ifTrue:ifFalse: is then a message sent to that boolean. It takes two arguments, a “then” block and an “else” else block. If the boolean value is true, it evaluates the “then” block, otherwise it evaluates the “else” block. No special syntax required.

Keywords and blocks are a fantastically powerful system. Blocks may also take arguments and can access variables declared outside of their scopes (i.e. they are closures), which means you’ve got a very simple syntax that lets you create all sorts of control structures and functional idioms like map and filter . It just looks funny.

Back to Finch

I wanted Finch to have that power but look less funny. (According to my definition of “funny”, of course. Smalltalkers think their language looks perfectly normal.) Here’s how our example would look in Finch:

if: numWeasels > numCakes then: { write: "Not enough cakes!" } else: { from: 1 to: numWeasels do: { write: "A weasel eats a cake!" } }

The first minor change is using curlies to define blocks instead of square brackets. The more interesting change is that if:then:else: doesn’t seem to have a receiver— an object that the method is acting on.

You’ll remember in Smalltalk that the condition numWeasels > numCakes comes before the ifTrue:ifFalse message. That’s because ifTrue:ifFalse is a method on boolean objects.

That’s a smart solution for Smalltalk, but it seemed strange to me to see the condition first. I think most programmers want to see the keyword to understand what that condition is for before seeing the expression itself. Hence if: comes before numWeasels > numCakes .

So how do I square that with the fact that Finch is OOP and every method must be a method on some object?

Enter the Ether

The answer is: through a little parser trick. If the parser encounters a keyword message before it’s encountered a receiver to send that message to (i.e. it parses foo: bar instead of obj foo: bar as expected), it automatically inserts Ether before it. “Ether” is a special global object that represents the implicit receiver of keyword messages if the receiver is omitted. (In some ways, this is similar to how you can omit this in most OOP languages.)

When you call if:then:else: in Finch, you’re sending that message to Ether, which is what handles the message. The result, I think, is a syntax as powerful as Smalltalk, but one that reads more naturally.

At the same time, we haven’t given up any of the flexibility of a dynamic OOP language. Ether is just a normal global object, which means you can add your own methods to it as you see fit. This lets you create top-level control structures in Finch that look just like “real” ones.

For example, the from:to:do: block we saw earlier is actually written in Finch. It uses while:do: which is the only looping construct explicitly built into the interpreter. Its definition is: