OpenEuphoria

Re: Goto?

• Posted by Kat <KAT12 at coo??hs.net> May 12, 2008
• 830 views

CChris wrote:
> 
> c.k.lester wrote:
> > 
> > Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
> > > 
> > > I have mixed emotions about it. Goto in some situations can be a very
> > > valuable
> > > construct but it can also be a construct that novice programmers can
> > > really
> > > get in trouble with causing hours of unnecessary debugging.
> > 
> > I've never encountered a case where a goto is the best solution. Never.
> > 
> > One thing I want to avoid on any interpreter upgrade is bloating the
> > interpreter and/or slowing it down. If goto is going to be considered, I'm
> > sure there are more popular options to be considered first.
> 
> There is one frequent case where goto could be tempting: exiting nested loops
> or if blocks.
> 
> It would be very useful, and not very difficult, to implement an "exit n" or
> "exit <loop_label" or exif for if blocks. This would be a valuable addition,
> without any new keyword.

In developing a syntactic parser, i discovered exponential explosions in
possibilities, and 90% of them could be eliminated early in the reparse. Having a
goto more than doubled parse speed and eliminated if-then flag tests all over the
place. Had i been forced to use exit(n), i'd have needed to keep an eye on all
exits every time i added or removed code during development.

Kat