Goto
Since some people think I should come out of hiding
and voice an opinion on language design proposals,
here's my current thinking about goto.
1. completely general goto, including jumps
between routines: 0% chance
2. goto within a routine: 0.01% chance
3. specialized goto to break out of nested loops: 1% chance
I'm not religiously opposed to goto's. There are some
goto's coded into the C source of the interpreter, and
at one point in the early days I even had one of the
"between routines" gotos that are possible in C using
setjmp()/longjmp(). It proved to be nightmarishly hard
to understand and maintain so I took it out.
I agree that a specialized goto (or special "exit")
to get out of a nested loop is probably less clumsy
than setting up artificial state variables. I just don't think
that this occurs often enough, or causes enough pain
to warrant a new language feature, such as labelled
statements and a special kind of exit.
The normal sort of gotos, that let you jump around within
a routine are like cigarettes. One or two, once in a while,
will not harm you. The trouble is they become addictive.
If you never start using them, you will never have a craving
for one.
When I had to maintain code written by someone
else, the sight of a heavily goto'd section of code would
really be discouraging. The guy who wrote the goto's
probably had some idea of what the control-flow was
supposed to be, but I had to struggle to get the
same picture into my head. Standard control-flow
statements, like for..end for, if-elsif-else etc are much
easier to digest and reason about.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
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