Does anybody else find it slightly weird and inconsistent that even if the programming language used inside the <Code> elements in the model XML file is stack-based with postfix operators, the conditional operators are not postfix. Compre this in MSFS XML
.... code that leaves a numeric value on top of stack ...
0 == if{
... code that is executed if it was zero ...
} els{
... code that is executed if it was not zero ...
}
... more code ...
to this in Postscript, which I guess nowadays is the best-known mainstream stack-based language with postfix operators:
... code that leaves a numeric value on top of stack ...
0 eq {
... code that is executed if it was zero ...
} {
... code that is executed if it was not zero ...
}
ifelse
... more code ...
Slightly annoying… I find the Postscript syntax much more orthogonal. In Postscript it is obvious that code blocks { ... } are just data objects, too, and they too get pushed onto the stack as they are encountered by the parser. In MSFS <Code>, if{, els{ and } are weird syntactic warts.
And if the rationale is “but this way the if statements look much more familiar”, that doesn’t really hold water, because if they wanted the code to look familiar to people used to “normal” programming languages, why then use a stack-based postfix language in the first place?