Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!efi!tim
From: tim@efi.com (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Multiple Inheritance -- Is It A Luxury?
Message-ID: <1990Jul13.184215.1274@efi.com>
Date: 13 Jul 90 18:42:15 GMT
References: <15132@reed.UUCP> <268BA8DC.4CD4@intercon.com> <8937@goofy.Apple.COM> <268C032E.5137@intercon.com> <1990Jul2.181147.1672@efi.com> <8967@goofy.Apple.COM> <1990Jul5.223032.14604@efi.com> <1990Jul6.182948.12005@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Electronics For Imaging, Inc.
Lines: 30

In article <1990Jul5.223032.14604@efi.com> tim@efi.com (Tim Maroney) writes:
>>A loop construct is
>>closer to the ordinary human way of seeing tasks than is a GOTO.  If
>>we're telling soemone how to do something, we might say "do this ten
>>times" or "keep doing it until the film is dry" or something of that
>>kind; we are much less likely to say "go back to step 5".

In article <1990Jul6.182948.12005@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu
(Steve Dorner) writes:
>As long as we're waxing philosophical:
>
>I think I'm far more likely to tell someone, "if the film isn't dry,
>do it again."  And "start over from the beginning" is also very common.
>Both of these are very much GOTO's.

Not at all!  They are very much loop instructions, and very much *not*
GOTO's.  Each of them carries semantic information informing the person
that this is an instruction to repeat something.  I suggest re-reading
the above in this light.  "Go to step 5" carries no such semantic
information.  It is merely notational, devoid of inherent meaning.

>I think loops and such are in fact very UNnatural. They take quite a bit
>of getting used to, which is not a comment on their utility or elegance.
>The same may be said of OOPL's; they're darn weird at first.

I used to help quite a few people who were learning to program at my
university.  I really don't remember any of them having much trouble
internalizing the concept of a loop, though some did have problems with
some of the subtleties of particular programming language's
*implementation* of loops -- particularly in Fortran and C.