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From: mckeeman@wivax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: goto is fast?
Message-ID: <19560@wivax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-May-84 16:57:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: wivax.19560
Posted: Tue May 29 16:57:13 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 30-May-84 00:52:54 EDT
Sender: mckeeman@wivax.UUCP
Organization: Wang Institute, Tyngsboro, Ma.  01879
Lines: 21

>Some of the tradeoffs between clarity and efficiency in
>programming were treated by Knuth in a Computing Surveys
>article, "Structured Programming with GOTOs."  It appeared
>about 15 years ago.

A curious follow-on to the Knuth article came from Toronto
almost immediately thereafter.  The stated but untested
assumption of most everyone those days was that recursion
was slow.  The Toronto folks ran the Knuth examples in a
bunch of languages in each of the Knuth iterated forms.  In
a large percentage of the cases the go-to versions were
larger and slower than the recursive versions (sounds of
amazement and wonder from the admiring crowd).  I would not
have been surprised on Burroughs equipment but this stuff
ran on PDP-11 and IBM hardware.  I have lost the reference
but I'll bet Dave Wortman or Rick Holt could dig it out (Hi
Dave, Hi Rick).

/s/ Bill   McKeeman.Wang-Inst at CSNet-Relay
           ...decvax!wivax!mckeeman
           Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Tyngsboro, MA 01879