On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 23:43 +0200, Jan Hudec wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 15:13:18 +0200, Bob Smith wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > There are numerous places in the Linux Kernel where the
> > C_Programming_Books_Most_Dreaded statement ('goto' of course)
> > is used.
>
> Most C programming books are wrong in this point ;-). Goto is part of the
Most C Programming books are correct in this point since they are
written for *beginners* and it is far too easy to get unmaintainable and
unreadable source code with 'goto'. And if your are understandable
enought to use 'goto' without mis- or abusing it, you will know it
(without a book).
> language because it is useful at times and occasionaly even necessary.
> The generic rule for readability is, that a construct that best represents
> what's going on should be used.
[....]
> By the way, most of the time you could rewrite those gotos to ifs _without_
> introducing repetition, but it would still introduce many levels of
> indentation, that would make the code unreadable.
Actually most of the 'goto's (not only in the kernel but in general)
could also (apart from the `if`) be rewritten with 'switch()' ...
'break;' (for forward jumps) and 'for(;;)', 'continue;' and 'break;' (if
you need a backwards jump). But this doesn't make the code more
readable.
Bernd
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