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in reply to (tye)Re: GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?
in thread GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?

It also avoids arguments with people who can't handle goto.

I'd agree with you, except I ran into at least one developer who thought that returns from the middle of subroutines were just as unreasonable as goto's. :)

I'm in the "if I can understand what it's doing, it's fine" camp, myself. The goto in the original message was pretty clear, as is your example.
--
Mike

  • Comment on Re: (tye)Re: GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?

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Re: Re: (tye)Re: GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 16, 2002 at 01:39 UTC
[reply]
      You seem to have misunderstood my position...

      I wasn't saying they were bad, I was just saying I'd worked with someone who thought
      a) goto's BAD, no exceptions
      b) return from middle of subroutine == goto.

      That's NOT my position at all. I believe in _necessary_ gotos, and don't mind return/redo/last/next at all, as long as they're not used to cause chaos :)
      --
      Mike

[reply]
        I didn't misunderstand. I was just not clear enough.

        I meant that to be a resource you can use in discussions with people whose understanding of structured programming is more religious than practical.

        As for goto, very few are "necessary", and experience says that so-called necessary gotos generally have a better replacement. Furthermore the ability to combine loop control and named loops removes the vast majority of goto statements - including every one that Knuth pointed to in his rebuttal as being useful for algorithmic efficiency. So while I might agree that necessary gotos are OK, I likely mean something different by that than you do.

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