Re: Re: Long Live GOTO

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Adam Richardson <simpleshot@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Larry Martell
> <larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
> Can I have the source for this so I can read the rationale? I'm curious
> which language implementation it's referencing (C, Ada, etc.) and what
> restrictions the language places on the construct. Again, the PHP version
> of the construct is beneficially quite restrictive. For instance, some
> people don't like giving programmers access to pointers just because you
> can get into so much trouble with them, but I wonder if they'd be concerned
> about Go's pointers, which don't allow pointer arithmetic, limiting one are
> of potential trouble:
>
> http://golang.org/doc/go_for_cpp_programmers.html#Conceptual_Differences
>
> Interesting.

The source is my own personal experience working for an avionics
company and working with the FAA to get our code certified under the
DO-178B standard. I never saw anything that said 'no GOTOs' but that's
what I was told. I was also told no C++ was allowed nor was any
recursion. This was important to me, as we had purchased some code
that was all that (C++, with recursion and GOTOs) and I was given the
task of rewriting it in C and removing the gotos and the recursion.

-- 
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php




[Index of Archives]     [PHP Home]     [Apache Users]     [PHP on Windows]     [Kernel Newbies]     [PHP Install]     [PHP Classes]     [Pear]     [Postgresql]     [Postgresql PHP]     [PHP on Windows]     [PHP Database Programming]     [PHP SOAP]

  Powered by Linux