So, I’m hanging out after an amazing day at RustConf working on a side project. I’m trying to practice a more “just experiment” attitude while playing with some code. This means not breaking things out into functions or other abstractions unless I have to. One thing that made this uncomfortable was when I’d accidentally shadow a variable or have a hard time seeing logical chunks. Usually a chunk of the code could be distilled into a single return value so a function would make sense, but it also makes my code less flexible during this discovery phase.

While reading some code I noticed a language feature I’d never noticed before. I knew about using braces to create scopes. And from that, I’d occasionally declare a variable above a scope, then use the scope to assign to it while keeping the code to create the value separated. Other languages have this concept so I knew it from there. Here is an example:

fn main() {
    let a = 2;
    let val;
    {
        let a = 1;
        let b = 3;
        val = a + b;
    } // local a and local b are dropped here
    println!("a: {}, val: {}", val); // a: 2, val: 4
}

But this feature I noticed let me do something to declare my intent much more exactly:

fn main() {
    let a = 2;
    let val = {
        let a = 1;
        let b = 3;
        a + b
    } // local a and local b are dropped here
    println!("a: {}, val: {}", val); // a: 2, val: 4
}

A scope can have a return value, so you just make the last expression return by omitting the semicolon and you can assign it out. Now I have something that I didn’t have to think about the signature of but separates some logic and namespace out. Then later once I’m done with discovery and ready to abstract a little bit to make things like error handling, testing, or profiling easier I have blocks that may be combined with a couple related blocks into a function.

https://wraithan.net/2016/09/11/assigning-blocks-in-rust/