Exit(n) vs. goto
-------Phoenix-Boundary-07081998-
A personal opinion on the inadvisability of 'exit(n)'.
The problem of breaking out of nested loops is real
but exit(n) is a bit of a write-only way of
handling it.
Ask yourself- Is the purpose of exit(N)
to break out of N loops, or is it to get to
a specific location in the code (which happens
to be at the end of a specific loop).
A loop that includes an exit(n) statement is making
assumptions about the structure of its environment.
Finding the target of exit(3) can be difficult,
involving the counting, both up and down, of 2
kinds of loops, possibly over several pages of
code. You can't even use your editor to do the
search!
Changing the nesting structure of the code
can require fixing exit() statements.
The typical use of exit(N) would be when some
significant milestone in the processing occured:
'error_found', or 'start_next_step'. 'exit(N)'
gives no clue.
Goto is more semanticly meaningful, more
versatile, runs faster and its target is more
easily found.
Karl Bochert
-------Phoenix-Boundary-07081998---
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