Why doesn’t Zig have C-style `for` loops?

[squeek502]

Been suggested many times and rejected each time.

• Proposal: C-style for loop · Issue #8292 · ziglang/zig · GitHub
• a place to put variables in only while loop scope · Issue #5070 · ziglang/zig · GitHub
• Introduce expression-scoped variables · Issue #8019 · ziglang/zig · GitHub

Potentially relevant:

Grammar related suggestions

It’s worth considering what Andrew Kelley says in this talk: It’s my goal and it’s still my goal to not get carried away, like, adding a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of features that are not in Zig and that’s very intentional, and it’s hard because, you know, everyone likes to propose features and it’s really easy to make fun of C++, but everyone has that one feature from C++ that they like and want to put it in in your language, they want to put it in Zig, and if everyone had their favorite fe…

Adding a new feature just to save a few lines of code isn’t really what Zig is interested in in my experience. Note also that for loops that work on ranges (e.g. for (0..end_index) |i| {) only got added as a side-effect of a different change with other use cases in mind: Proposal: Multi-object `for` loops · Issue #7257 · ziglang/zig · GitHub