Proposal for a new kind of switch statement

gistfile1.txt

I propose a new statement called (there is a better term for this, but I haven't thought of it) “bitswitch”.

It would work much like a regular switch statement, and could be implemented as a macro on top of it in many languages:

  bitswitch(container, test) {
    case all:
    case single:
    case multiple:
    case none:
    default: //Only meaningful if you don't use all four cases
  }

The test should be an expression (in Objective-C and some other languages, it could be a block). It would be applied to every element of the container, and then return one of the aforementioned case values.

This would save running multiple passes over the collection if you have multiple cases to cover.