An Oddity of History

i was watching crash course computer science on youtube. it's been kind of amusing, i have learned a few things, but there just isn't much i didn't already know... with the episodes shown so far, anyway.

but i ran across the example below, which was illustrating the 'else' clause:

if x then
print a
else
print b

and i had this weird 'wait a minute, i often don't do that in that way!'... at first, i briefly had a judgement that my way was better. when i asked myself why i thought this way was better, my cpu came back with a shrug.

this is the kind of structure i have historically often used:

r = a
if x then
r = b
print r

and as i sat there scratching my head, i realized that long ago, msdos 2.1 batch files didn't support else. in fact, the modern cmd.exe command set does support else, though i wasn't able to track down when that was added (or if it had been there all along and just poorly documented).

my approach requires extra memory. when you put all the commands on the same line, mine is slightly shorter. i don't think either of these differences qualifies as better. and i guess one of the marks of a good engineer is one that doesn't hold onto the old way of doing it just because that's what they learned. yay for having dispelled an obsolete assumption!