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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Bad language constructs
Message-ID: <2877@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 19:03:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2877
Posted: Mon Jul  9 19:03:03 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Jul-84 03:42:33 EDT
References: ea5400012 <1986@mit-eddi.UUCP
Lines: 23

<>
If you think arithmetic IFs in FORTRAN are bad...

Both FORTRAN and COBOL offer redirectable goto statements.  E.g. in COBOL
(just for variety) one can write

...
INSIDIOUS-PARAGRAPH.
      GO TO MILWAUKEE.
...
      ALTER INSIDIOUS-PARAGRAPH TO PROCEED TO GOBI-DESERT.

And guess what happens when code hits GO TO MILWAUKEE.  (Well, it depends
on whether the ALTER has been executed.)  ALTER was removed from a recent
COBOL standard and the response from the DP community was furious (there
are these old programs, see...) and I got out of active COBOL programming
before the controversy was settled.  Anyway, this is the a-number-one
HORRIBLE programming feature of all time!!!!!

D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
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