13 May
2005
13 May
'05
4:22 a.m.
On Fri, 13 May 2005 07:22:55 +0200, Tom Jennings <tomj at wps.com> wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2005, Jay West wrote:
Drum machines made people understand what they were doing.
I am still very impressed with Gier Algol. I doubt I would be able to
write any kind of functional compiler with that set of hardware
constraints.
The goto statement, however, is useful or harmful depending on your
combination of hardware and language implementation.
I do not see the next instruction pointer of a three-address machine as an
implementation of the goto statement any more than the hidden instruction
pointer in an X86-CPU which increments just enough to take us past the
current instruction.
The important point to me is whether there is a "jump to
somewhere"-concept in the mind of the programmer. If a WHILE is
implemented in assembler, it is still a while and not "branch-if-false,
do-something, go-to-top".
--
Bj?rn
Ya know, I gotta disagree... and this is coming
from a programmer who
made liberal use of the GOTO statement.
I have to agree with you too; GOTO is just another tool in the
toolbox. It's useful as hell (eg. error-exit it switch() or
whatever).
A lot of reaction against excessive GOTOs was from the horrible
things early FORTRANs made you do, and macho programmers who
stopped learning early. I have to wonder what the cultures of
optimization that sprung up around drum machines did too.