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From: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: An amusing piece of code
Message-ID: <360@hadron.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Apr-86 23:54:25 EST
Article-I.D.: hadron.360
Posted: Mon Apr  7 23:54:25 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Apr-86 01:19:07 EST
References: <1370@ism780c.UUCP>
Reply-To: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Organization: Hadron, Inc., Fairfax, VA
Lines: 18
Summary: Jumping into blocks is a no-no.

In article <1370@ism780c.UUCP> tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) writes:
>	switch ( thing ) {
>case A:         A-code; break;
>case B:         B-code; if ( 0 ) {
>case C:         C-code; if ( 0 ) {
>case D:         D-code; }}
>		BCD-common-code; break;
>case E:         E-code;
>	}

Assuming that you can't put BCD-common-code into a function, I
agree with everyone else that you should use [forward-referencing!]
goto's here, and [again] cite Prof. Knuth's _Structured_Programming_
_with_Goto's_.  One major problem is that this code jumps into blocks
[the effect of case C: and case D: ].  This is something that X3J11
warns about.  I thought K&R did, too; but I can't find it.  It is
generally a bad practice, although most compilers seem to allow it
without too much trouble.