On Tuesday 26 December 2006 15:10, Rick Stevens wrote: >On Tue, 2006-12-26 at 14:07 -0500, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy wrote: >> Terry Polzin wrote: >> > goto was also used in COBOL before "perform x thru y" became the >> > common way of coding the procedure division. I think it's also used >> > in fortran as well. >> >> There is actually a goto in many languages, including C, C++ and I >> think Java, but if you use goto in your C program, your colleagues are >> liable to break your arms and knee-caps, knock out your teeth and poke >> out your eyes with a corkscrew and actually get away with it on >> grounds of justifiable self defence. > Chuckle, even a bit of ROTFLMAO. Surely you jest, else we'd have the most crippled up, blind and begging kernel developers you ever saw working on just the kernel: [root@coyote linux-2.6.20-rc1]# grep -R goto *|wc -l 43490 So apparently it is not as debasing a function to use as the preachers here would have us believe. >Well, if you read Kernighan & Ritchey's original "The C Programming >Language" book, the "goto" was only put in because C doesn't provide a >multi-level break statement. The only way out of that situation short >of lots and lots of sentinel values is a goto. Of course, they also >state that if you are more than four levels of indentation deep, you >probably should think about splitting out a function or rethinking your >logic. Yes, I've read that, twice. I have both books. >There are times where a "goto" is appropriate, but one should try to >minimize its use--true in almost any procedural language. If you want >to abuse the "goto", write in BASIC. :-) > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - >- VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com - >- - >- "I'd explain it to you, but your brain might explode." - >---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
