Design idea: terse function single-expression function body syntax

[zygoloid]

Early Carbon language design ideas included having a terser way of writing a function definition in the case where the body is a single expression. Instead of:

fn F() -> auto {
  return expr;
}

... we could allow something like ...

fn F() => expr;

In such cases, an omitted return type would be treated as -> auto. Some other languages such as C# have similar functionality.

Particular concerns that a proposal should consider:

• Is this sufficiently motivated? How widely used is the corresponding C# feature? How does this affect readability of Carbon code?
• Should an explicit return type be permitted?
• What syntax should be used? => seems nice but might be too similar to ->. Also, => in a case is followed by a block not an expression, creating some amount of inconsistency.
• Whatever syntax is chosen should presumably also be available in lambdas; how well does the chosen syntax fit there?

[josh11b]

Food for thought, from Wren:

The nice thing about [Wren's] syntax as opposed to something like => is that the end of the block has an explicit delimiter. That helps when chaining:

numbers.map {|n| n * 2 }.where {|n| n < 100 }

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