Re: When it comes to GOTOs...
- Posted by Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen <nieuwen at XS4ALL.NL> Sep 27, 1998
- 425 views
>what i'm saying is, there might be some hurdles necessary to overcome in >order to achieve goto type statments--not only that, but I seem to remember >having line numbers fell in somewhere along "horrible, terrible"--perhaps a >"tag" as in html would be more appropriate. Goto is hack. Its ugly. It is a shame we have a need for them at times. Reconcider your algorithm. However structured goto's might give us a bit more freedom to structure an algorithm more in the way we see it, then how it fits the interpreter. And no, interpreters love gotos. Internally Euphoria makes it one big-goto. All built-in expressors, statements and routines are replaced with a 32-bit memory pointer of the machine code to handle that action, followed up by pointers pointing to the variables or values that need to be used. And eventually, a pointer where to store the variable. And next comes the pointer of the next command, which is 'JMP' (jumped) to by the last command. In other words, there's one big stack, and Ex.exe is jumping around on it. Goto's are pretty natural internally thus, however they are not the tools to use in algorithms. That would be bad style. A hack. Ralf