'goto" gone from computer languages or is it! - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

13 May 2005

...
  > 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.  
 On Fri, 13 May 2005, woodelf wrote:

 > Well it has come back to haunt us since random access memory
 > has got replaced by cashe and deep pipelined cpu's.  Try writing
 > a loop and see what happens ... No wait a loop has the dreaded GOTO. 
One of my first programming projects in college was write a program to
printout 26 hands of Bridge ... I was a Bridge major :). Not knowing
enough, I exited one of the Fortran IV loops with a goto. Big mistake!
Finally one of the professors found the problem on a second or third
look after I had shown the code to almost everyone in the department
with no success.

I still like the goto ... just not to exit loops :).