11 May
2005
11 May
'05
10:56 p.m.
I absolutely concur with John's conclusion:
Academia, the elites or otherwise, saw the 'horrors' of goto and declared it
an evil that was to be expunged from any language. The toolbox was
diminished by this action in my humble opinion. Yet for us QBasic guys we
still employ it. Boy does it get one out of a jam. Mimics real life doesn't
it?
Computing forever!
Murray
On Wed, 11 May 2005, John Foust wrote:
> Speaking as that voice from the future, reading
ALGOL makes
> me say "You don't want to do it that way." GOTO had not yet
> been exorcised. Did I see a computed goto, where the expression
> calculates the label? Eeek. Certainly it was a step forward,
> but we've also learned a lot since then. When people complain
> that computer languages haven't changed much, remind them
> of the stuff that's fallen out of recommended practice.
I miss GOTO. It was unnecessarily expunged from the programmmer's toolbox
by elitist academics.
11 May
11 May
10:16 p.m.
Ya know, I gotta disagree... and this is coming from a programmer who made
liberal use of the GOTO statement.
I was preached to in college about not using it, but I still did. For many
years in professional life as well. But when I got the C bug, I started
conciously trying to keep it out of the other languages I used. I found the
code to be prettier, more easy to follow, and easier to modify. But then,
I've always been obsessive about modularization, most routines are just a
few lines of code.
Not that I look down on programmers who use it, not in the least. But for
me, I'm fairly happy it's less common nowdays.
And this is coming from someone who adored HP TSB, where GOTO's are
extremely frequent :)
Jay West
13 May
13 May
1:22 a.m.
On Wed, 11 May 2005, Jay West wrote:
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.
5:18 a.m.
Tom Jennings wrote:
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.
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.
11:42 p.m.
> 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.
So what exactly are you complaining about? :-)
7:22 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.
12 May
12 May
11:52 a.m.
On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 21:56 -0500, Cmurray wrote:
I absolutely concur with John's conclusion:
Academia, the elites or otherwise, saw the 'horrors' of goto and declared it
an evil that was to be expunged from any language. The toolbox was
diminished by this action in my humble opinion. Yet for us QBasic guys we
still employ it. Boy does it get one out of a jam. Mimics real life doesn't
it?
Actually goto and it's ilk (continue, break, ...) are extremely useful
and when used properly can actually improve readability and
maintainability of code.
The best example is for use in an error path were some (a lot?) of
cleanup needs to be done. I assert that having the cleanup code
replicated 4 or 5 (or ??) times is *less* clear and *less* maintainable
than having the cleanup code (at the end of the function) once and all
of the error paths "goto" it.
For example:
if (p == NULL) {
rc = RC_P_NULL;
goto err_exit;
}
...
if (q == NULL) {
rc = RC_Q_NULL;
goto err_exit;
}
...
err_exit:
if (p != NULL)
free(p);
if (q != NULL)
free(q);
return(rc);
Computing forever!
Murray
On Wed, 11 May 2005, John Foust wrote:
--
TTFN - Guy
> Speaking as that voice from the future,
reading ALGOL makes
> me say "You don't want to do it that way." GOTO had not yet
> been exorcised. Did I see a computed goto, where the expression
> calculates the label? Eeek. Certainly it was a step forward,
> but we've also learned a lot since then. When people complain
> that computer languages haven't changed much, remind them
> of the stuff that's fallen out of recommended practice.
I miss GOTO. It was unnecessarily expunged from the programmmer's toolbox
by elitist academics.
1:12 p.m.
I miss GOTO. It was unnecessarily expunged from the
programmmer's toolbox
by elitist academics.
It's still present in quite a few languanges. It just doesn't have to
be used. I know of people who use them in long C functions to avoid
large "else" blocks when checking for early return from a function,
especially when there is lots of cleanup to be done before returning.
But if there's more than one goto destination in a function, there's
probably a better way.
But predominantly GOTO was used to make up for missing language
features. (BASICs without else, languages with single statement or
single line IF, languages without case or switch statements, languages
without subroutines, languages without a "repeat forever").
If you're using a language that has all these features you probably
don't need a goto. (Of course, the assembly for all of the above will
contain jumps, conditional or otherwise.)
COME FROM is more useful than goto anyway. :)
Eric
4:53 p.m.
I absolutely concur with John's conclusion:
Academia, the elites or otherwise, saw the 'horrors' of goto and declared it
an evil that was to be expunged from any language. The toolbox was
diminished by this action in my humble opinion. Yet for us QBasic guys we
still employ it. Boy does it get one out of a jam. Mimics real life doesn't
it?
I regard 'goto as the programming equivalent of the adjustable spanner.
There are often better tools to use, using it wrongly can get you into
real trouble, but it's rare to find a hacker who's not used it (just as
mo hardware guy will use an adjustable spanner when there are better
tools available, but I don't know of a serious hardware hacker who
doesn't have one in the toolbox...)
-tony
15 May
15 May
2:20 a.m.
On Thu, 12 May 2005 21:53:28 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
Heck, I even have an adjustable box-end wrench. *ducks*
The folks who deplore GOTO are the 'Structured Programming' folks. Who
have a lot of flavors and attempts at 'structured programming' behind
them now, and keep chugging along. It's about sociable coding, as
opposed to asocial 'solitary' coding. Which is important. But as an
over-experienced Assembly Language programmer, I got into trouble in my
'Intro to C' course because I was in the habit of writing my own
functions instead of using The Standard Library.
-scott
I absolutely concur with John's conclusion:
Academia, the elites or otherwise, saw the 'horrors' of goto and
declared it an evil that was to be expunged from any language. The
toolbox was diminished by this action in my humble opinion. Yet for
us QBasic guys we still employ it. Boy does it get one out of a jam.
Mimics real life doesn't it?
I regard 'goto as the programming equivalent of the adjustable
spanner. There are often better tools to use, using it wrongly can get
you into real trouble, but it's rare to find a hacker who's not used
it (just as mo hardware guy will use an adjustable spanner when there
are better tools available, but I don't know of a serious hardware
hacker who doesn't have one in the toolbox...)
-tony
7011
days inactive
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days old
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