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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Portable C vs Efficient C or "Cost of Portability"
Message-ID: <6446@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Sun, 12-Apr-87 16:03:52 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.6446
Posted: Sun Apr 12 16:03:52 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Apr-87 23:45:22 EST
References: <213@pyuxe.UUCP> <636@edge.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 39
In-reply-to: doug@edge.UUCP's message of 10 Apr 87 22:03:47 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bu-cs (berkeley-unix)


I believe "portability" will become the "goto-less" programming of the 80's.

In both cases the suggestions should be applied 98% of the time.

The use of goto programming before "the movement" was rampant and
causing all sorts of difficulty. I experienced that, I worked with
large Fortran programs in which GOTO was the favorite control
construct, necessary or not and usually badly thought out (like
jumping out and back into the same code segment so the new code can be
put at the bottom, no joke.) It was argued that some of this Fortran
code was getting all the useful work done in the interstices of the
gotos :-)

Then came the prosletytes, for example the professors who gave an F
on any programming assignment that contained a goto, no matter what
the reason (I've personally known professors here with that policy
only a few years ago.)

Of course that was nonesense.

We finally (at least those of us getting work done) came to some
agreement that goto's were ok under certain conditions (eg. jumping out of
a multiply nested loop on an error condition to quickly "give up",
rather than adding noisy bells and whistles flags.)

I assume we are somewhere in the same cycle with portability, with the
same healthy result.

As with gotos, we want to think *real* hard before introducing
non-portability into a program. For example, if you can get
significant performance increase (which you can demonstrate you can
benefit from) and even conditionalize the code so it decides whether
to compile portably or not, then go to it. And know the consequences.

That's all. Common sense. 98% of the non-portable code smashed (hopefully)
just like 98% of the gotos. We all win.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University