Control structures

In comparison to many other languages, control structures in Tokay are part of expressions. They always return a value, which defaults to void when no other value is explicitly returned.

if...else

The if...else-construct implements conditional branching depending on the result of an expression.
The else part is optional, and can be omitted.

if sense == 42 && axis == 23.5 {
    print("Well, this is fine!")
}
else {
    print("That's quite bad.")
}

As stated before, all control structures are part of Tokays expression syntax. Above example can easily by turned into

print(
    if sense == 42 && axis == 23.5
        "Well, this is fine!"
    else
        "That's quite bad."
)

or directly used inside of an expression.

# if can be part of an expression
Word "Hello " + if $1 == "World" "Earth" else $1

if...else constructs working on static expressions are optimized away during compile-time.

loop

The loop-keyword is used to create loops, either with an aborting conditions on top or without any condition.

# Countdown
count = 10
loop count >= 0 print(
    if --count == 3
        "Ignition"
    else if count < 0
        "Liftoff"
    else
        count
)

A loop can be aborted everytime using the break-statement.
The continue-statement restarts the loop at the beginning, but a present abort-condition will be re-checked again.

count = 10
loop {
    count = count - 1
    if count == 3 {
        print("Ignition")
        continue
    }

    print(count)
    if count == 0 {
        print("Liftoff")
        break
    }
}

A loop without any aborting condition loops forever.

loop print("Forever!")

for

The for-keyword introduces a special form of loop that syntacically glues the parts initialization, abort condition and iteration together into a separate syntactic element.

for count = 10; count >= 0; count-- {
    print(i)
}

This syntax is abandoned. The upcoming version 0.7 of Tokay will only support for...in.