On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 11:01 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Boy! Those C people sound like a very bad group .
>>> Back in the "Basic" days of computers they where more friendly.
>>
>> Nah, its all propaganda from the "if you can't dazzle them with
>> brilliance, baffle them with technospeak" crowd.
>
>Or ranting from someone who had to maintain code with thousands of
>goto's to targets not visible on the same page and mostly slight
>spelling variations of the same word. It is easy to lose the logic
>if you can't track the program flow.
And that's dead on too, Les. Years ago I went through an amiga program
full of goto's and buggier than a 10 day old carcass, changing every goto
name into something I could remember. I found and fixed 7 or 8 bugs and
made a stable program out of it that way, but before I was done I
questioned every aspect of the authors breeding. That was back when I
had CommodeDoor stuff under the desk... Seems like yesterday but it was
probably in the early 90's.
Long before that, vi had bracket/brace matching: put the cursor
on a brace or bracket and hit the % key and the cursor would jump to
the corresponding start/end brace/bracket so it is easy to see the
scope of normal C flow control structures even in badly formatted
code. With goto's there not only is not any real structure to see,
there can be multiple references to a single target and no way at
all to track the "come from's".
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com