On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Alain Williams <addw@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 11:12:53AM -0500, Jim Giner wrote: >> NO "GO"! >> As one who started back in the 70's with old style coding that utilized GoTo >> in Cobol, Fortran, etc. and had to deal with "spaghetti code" written by >> even earlier developers who never considered that someone else would have to >> maintain their code, I feel strongly that GoTo is not to be used. > > I remember being faced with spaghetti code 35 odd years ago - yes, horrible. > But what do we mean by ''spaghetti code'' ? I remember code where every 3rd > statement was some form of GOTO - yuck! > > One very desirable feature of code is that it be clear, ie: lucid, able to be > understood by others. Too many GOTO statements and it is hard. > > However: a few GOTOs can make things clearer. Think of a function that can fail > in several different places (eg data validation, ...). But it is reading a file > which needs to be closed before the function returns. I have seen code where > some $IsError variable is tested in many places to see if things should be done. > That is just as bad as lots of GOTO -- often when having to write something like > that I will have a GOTO (in several places) to the bottom of the function that > closes the file and returns failure. > > That is much clearer than extra variables. > > If I survey my code I find that I use one GOTO in about 4,000 lines of code - > that I do not find excessive. > > There are, however, people who consider any GOTO as communion with the devil. > IMHO: not so - if used sparingly. Just for another data point, the FAA does not allow gotos in any code that goes into an airplane. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
