26 Feb
2010
26 Feb
'10
6:18 p.m.
At 12:03 PM 2/26/2010, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 26 Feb 2010 at 12:46, Dave McGuire wrote:
Every good cartoonist knows you draw the words first, then put the box around them.
Speaking of loops, this topic was covered in 1999 and 2005.
- John
At 10:12 AM 5/11/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Feb 26, 2010, at 12:38 PM, Brent Hilpert
wrote:
> When I was writing lots of C code in the 80's, I used goto's quite
> regularly (I can hear the shrieks! and gasps! and jaws hitting the
> floor out there, or perhaps not from this audience).
Every programmer I've ever known when faced with a blackboard or
whiteboard and asked to describe the operation of a program starts
out by drawing a box and filling it with text. Then another... I miss GOTO. It was unnecessarily expunged from the
programmmer's toolbox
by elitist academics.
It's a tool. Why, I discussed this with a "Sam Ismail" back in 1999:
- John
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 16:00:07 +0000
To: classiccmp at u.washington.edu, <dastar at ncal.verio.com>
From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
Subject: Re: Computers for children
At 11:37 PM 1/14/99 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
Remember, C has a goto statement, although I don't think in my nearly 10
years of C programming I've ever used it, although on certain rare
occasions it seemed the easy way out to a sticky coding problem.
[...] but C really suffers from a lack of
a general error trapping mechanism that one can invoke to break out of
loops as required. Sometimes I think goto's are the answer but I can
never find an appropriate way to implement it.
I use "goto" in C on a regular and consistent basis for error exceptions:
USHORT firstFunction( void )
{
USHORT lerr;
if ((lerr=secondFunction()) != TE_NOERROR) {
goto out;
}
out:
return lerr;
}
The benefit is that all functions propogate an error code, any
function can fail, and all functions clean up after themselves
after their "out" label.
- John