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From: wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David Wald)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Usage of goto's
Message-ID: <1990Oct6.200002.28052@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 6 Oct 90 20:00:02 GMT
References: <1990Sep28.121230.17767@NCoast.ORG> <465@taumet.com>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
Reply-To: wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David Wald)
Organization: Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT
Lines: 24

In article <465@taumet.com> steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:
>Probably the best discussions on this topic were published in
>	ACM Computing Surveys
>	Vol 6, No 4, December 1974
>If you have access to a CS library, go look up this volume.  In one
>paper, Niklaus Wirth shows why goto's are unnecessary, and in another
>Donald Knuth shows why "absolutely no goto's" is a needlessly harsh
>dictum.

Also recommended reading on this topic, especially if you feel very
strongly about it:

"A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less Programming", by R. Lawrence
Clark, in the December 1973 issue of Datamation, reprinted in the
April 1984 issue of Communications of the ACM (vol. 27, no. 4, pp 349-350).

This article describes an alternative to the "harmful" goto construct,
called "come from".

-David
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David Wald                                           wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu
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