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But language attempts to resemble spoken language precisely so we don't have to rely on the documentation alone. We use if/else, not "xan/ka" because we want t

But language attempts to resemble spoken language precisely so we don't have to rely on the documentation alone. We use if/else, not "xan/ka" because we want to leverage the existing meaning of those words. In the early stages of Perl 6 design I requested a for/else feature where the "else" block fired if and only if the for loop had never been entered...the opposite of how this works. Being literally the opposite of how I would write it qualifies as surprising to me.

SamReidHughes 8y ago
Naming is useful for getting adoption but not when you already know the language. And in your case you might have been surprised, but that's because you'd take a guess at what the feature does instead of finding out. (I don't think for/else is the best option, gotos are. It's just not a harmful feature, the way other aspects of Python are.)