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@xxxxxxxxx
