OpenEuphoria

Re: The 'goto' debate

• Posted by Euler German <efgerman at myrealbox.com> Feb 07, 2002
• 442 views

On 7 Feb 2002, at 2:32, Kat wrote:

To:             	EUforum <EUforum at topica.com>
From:           	Kat <gertie at PELL.NET>
Subject:        	Re: The 'goto' debate
Date sent:      	Thu, 7 Feb 2002 02:32:16 -0600
Send reply to:  	EUforum at topica.com

> 
> I worry about those big if-elsif-endif stacks, for other than the careful 
> indenting, and runtime error checks, i am never sure if 5 pages of such a 
> stack is going to execute properly. Many times i have printed out the pile,
> and
> manually checked off matching elsif-elsif indents to be more sure of just what
> was going to happen. Besides, with that many in the if-pile, the goto
> functioning at a case statement, resolving the possible targets at compile
> time,
> should be *much* faster for those statements at the bottom of the stack. And
> yes, i could have broken each then-clause off to a separate function, except
> for
> the local var passing back and forth.
> 
Well Kat, I agree with you here. It's *very* difficult (and quite annoying) to 
handle those stacks. I had the same problem with Clipper but I learned how to 
handle it. On that time, I was porting a MUMPS application (huge) into Clipper. 
The first time it was too slow, then it got a lot better and finally it worked 
as perfect as (or better than). It's still working today though I'm not in 
charge anymore. I used a debugger (not Clipper's debug) do show open laces or 
wrong closing. It helped a lot.

Of course I had to use too much indentation which quite often force code to 
side scroll (what I personally hate) but when you have a good editor this is 
not a problem at all. On other side, unconditional moving (GOTO :LABEL:) will 
turn it on vertical scroll which is no good either. So, the only way to debug 
is to hardprint the code to get an overall view.

I have no complains on using GOTOs, EXITs, CONTINUEs, IFs..END_IFs, 
CASEs..END_CASEs or whatsoever. I have been working with so many languages an 
dialects for so many years that I simply don't care. I just accept the language 
'AS IS' and try to get along. Right now, I'm nothing but a (Euphoria) newbie. 
I'll try it and see if I can get along...

Cheers!

-- Euler