VOTE

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 27 Dec 2006, Les Mikesell wrote:

> 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".

Ah, reminds me of the old proposal to replace GOTOs with COMEFROMs.  They 
worked like this:  As you were reading a sequence of statements you'd see

 	COMEFROM <line#>

The following statements would be executed if control passed through in 
line or if control was received by a branch from <line#>.  The fun part 
was that there was no indication to the reader at the statement <line#> 
that control transferred from there to elsewhere in the program.

Made GOTOs seem downright comprehensible...

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs