if-then-else VS rust-delegate

I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer viable for this is the terrible state of translation from English to German. Instead of using the "established" German terms, English terms are usually translated 1:1 to German, usually by machine translation, or bad human translators who don't have a technological background.

And instead of this butchering of the fine German language, just switching to English is indeed the better alternative.

My favourite trivia is that the 'else' in 'if-else' is a bad translation from German into English btw ;) (https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)

There is a neat history of the early syntax of conditional expressions here https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el... titled “if-then-else had to be invented”. It seems “else” originated in Algol 60 as a hasty translation from German. The CPL project started in the early 1960s when it was not yet certain that Algol-style block structure and keywords would become the common basis of most programming languages.

If..then..else had to be invented

Not to mention that linux-pam's `[success=2 default=ignore]` isn't even standard, I think OpenPAM only has the five control flags required/requisite/sufficient/binding/optional. (One may reasonably despair as to the difference between "required" and "requisite".)

It's almost as if PAM were developed before the invention of the if-then-else construct in the 1950s.[0]

[0]: https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...

Ah, that answers the first question, as to how inheritance is superior to manual delegation. By the way, this crate seems to do a good job of supporting delegation: https://crates.io/crates/delegate. I have nothing against this in principle.

This is certainly one that's bugged me too. There's the delegate crate which helps, but is still a decent amount of boilerplate due to macro limitations

As u/onomatopeiaddx said, it isn't possible since macros only have access to the token tree it is given. I don't see why a newtype wouldn't work tho. and to help with newtypes you may want to have a look at the delegate crate

Macros, probably. For example this one, that was already made by someone else, published on crates.io and is actively maintained. If the feature is already possible in rust, but requires a lot of boilerplate, then macros are the answer 99% of the time.

delegate crate would reduce some boilerplate.