Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!ked
From: ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: The "evil" GOTO (more than a week of pure drek)
Message-ID: <24509@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 17 May 89 05:57:07 GMT
References: <24330@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <13765@lanl.gov>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 36

In article <13765@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>From article <24330@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, by ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth):
>As a non-historian, it is interesting to watch people who are allegedly
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Nothing alleged. I was hired as an historian and am paid as an
historian, however much I might like to be paid at the generally higher
rates prevailing for computer science types in the UC system.

>Incidently, if I'm not allowed to make ideological remarks, why are you?

What's your problem? I said I found ideological comments under the
guise of objective statements "interesting." You may interpret that as
meaning whatever you will, but "interesting" is "interesting!"

HOWEVER, putting on a different hat, as a C programmer, I would deeply
appreciate it (as an amateur C programmer) if those who assert the
merits of one style over another provide definitions of

(a)	efficiency;

(b)	ease of maintenance;

(c)	criteria for measuring (a) and (b).

Without these, the debate becomes the equivalent of the flame wars that
occur every couple of months in the "editors" newsgroup. There, about
every two months, one gets a round of - "only twits use vi, only dweebs
use emacs."

I would presume, perhaps naively, that the professional and would-be
professional C programmers in this group would be able to provide an
amateur such as myself with an objective set of criteria, perhaps a
test suite or two, to measure, according to well-defined criteria, the
relative advantages and disadvantages of alternative programming
styles. If not, the whole discourse is pointless and should be moved to
one of the "religion" or "consciousness" news groups.