addresswhether

Addresswhether is a term used in discussions of programming language design and program analysis to describe a pattern in which the outcome of a boolean condition is made explicit to downstream code by returning or carrying an addressable representation of the chosen branch. The term is not widely standardized and is considered a neologism in theoretical and experimental contexts.

Conceptually, addresswhether contrasts with ordinary conditional statements that immediately select and execute a branch. Proponents imagine an operator or function, addresswhether(cond, onTrue, onFalse), that evaluates cond and yields a structured result indicating which branch would be taken, often including a reference or address to the corresponding code path. In effect, it pairs the decision with an explicit target, enabling clients to inspect the outcome before dispatching control or to perform transformations at the level of the control flow graph.

Potential applications include program analysis, optimization, and the design of domain-specific languages where decision points are modeled as data. It can facilitate tooling that analyzes, rewrites, or synthesizes branches, and can align with concepts such as tagged unions, sum types, or continuation-passing style.

Critics argue that addresswhether adds indirection and reduces readability, with limited practical benefit outside experimental languages. As a concept, it remains primarily theoretical or confined to niche DSLs and teaching materials rather than a mainstream programming pattern. Related ideas include if-else expressions, pattern matching, and discriminated unions.