Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!rex!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: The "evil" GOTO (Was: 25 Years of BASIC)
Message-ID: <919@twwells.uucp>
Date: 11 May 89 22:23:04 GMT
References: <1814@ubu.warwick.UUCP> <6540009@hpcupt1.HP.COM>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 32
Summary:
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:
Distribution:
Keywords:

In article <6540009@hpcupt1.HP.COM> jacka@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Jack C. Armstrong) writes:
: In all of this GOTO/NOGOTO nonsense, no one seems to have mentioned just
: WHY gotos are so ugly - it's not the goto statement that causes readability
: problems - is the %&#!$! label!  When reading source written by others (or
: myself, more than 5 minutes ago) the presense of a label tells me *somebody*,
: *somewhere* does a goto to this location.  The question is - who? from where?

This is all perfectly correct and is implicit in "making the control
structures apparent", the point of structured programming.

: [N.B.  the break and return statements used in C have the same problem, with
: the added 'charm' of no explicit label.  A goto by any other name.....]

But this is a non sequiter. *All* control structures are "goto[s] by
any other name". Break and return are very easy to deal with. Return
always leaves the current function (you *do* know what that is,
right?). Break and continue always leave the innermost loop or
switch; provided that you've indented the code correctly, the place
the break goes to is immediately obvious.

: Cross-listing directories help, but how long do they stay accurate?  In the
: interest of free speech, I hate to see gotos totally censored, and as an old
: Algol 60 hacker from the 60's I avoid them like the plague, but I'll still
: stand up for your right to use them judiciously, where needed, but *please*
: comment on its use!

The coding standard where I work (written by myself) requires this;
moreover, when efficiency is the claimed reason, the comment is
required to have the timing statistics to prove it.

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill