It sounds like what you're saying is that the parenthesis and brackets would appear as soon as you typed
if<spacebar>
This idea would need to be fleshed out, and surely made optional, because if 'identifier warning' is unchecked by default, I would assume this would also.
I'm writing this from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't see themselves as part of the target audience, so would need a little more convincing. (I don't know of the development environment you speak of)
If this option were enabled, I would assume the other environment of which you speak has a way to easily get rid of the inserted string in case they don't want them. Also, this could have an effect on Ctrl+Z/Y undo/redo.
If someone does want to have the parenthesis inserted automagically, I assume the desired behavior would be to move the cursor inside the parenthesis, because it would be simpler to type the parenthesis myself than to
+ find the arrow key or mouse to navigate inside the opening parenthesis
+ type the interior condition
+ find the arrow key to move past the closing parenthesis then navigate inside the curly braces
+ use {END} so I can then {ENTER} to add the next line of code.
Also the desired 'coaching' behavior would probably be to include several spaces inside the auto-added curly braces so that the novice isn't coached into expecting that it's fine for the interior command to touch the curly braces.
Strangely, I found at least 1 edge case where you can have both curly braces touch something and it still works. This is the kind of crazy stuff where requiring the language to support it can make the parser slower. It works whether or not the opening curly touches the preceding text but in either case the closing must touch the parenthesis:
success:
//noop $findfile($mircdir,*,0,1,if *.ini iswm $1 { echo -a $1 })
success:
//noop $findfile($mircdir,*,0,1,if (*.ini iswm $1){ echo -a $1 })
--
If you're proposing this for if(), I wonder what other things in that other environment are you thinking would be relevant here, besides doing the same thing for while()
/while has the same variety of syntax that if() has, and even more-so since it's much more common for the while { condition } to be split across lines.
The idea behind your proposal does have merit. As I've mentioned several times in forum posts, I agree the new scriptors should get in the habit of 'when in doubt use parenthesis', partly because it's easier for them to read their code later, but also because there's several different cases where dropping the parenthesis can change the behavior of $v1, such as here where setting %a to an odd or even number fills $v1 using a completely different if() condition.
//var %a 1 | if (abcd == defg) noop | if %a isin 13579 echo -a $v1 is odd %a | else echo -a $v1 is even %a
