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

13 May 2005

...
 From: "Lyle Bickley" <lbickley at
bickleywest.com>

On Friday 13 May 2005 14:37, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
  From: "Lyle Bickley" <lbickley at
bickleywest.com>
 ---snip---
   The first sentence in

 the final paragraph reads: "The moral of this
discussion is that writing
 code which depends on order of evaluation is a bad programming practice
 in any language."

I'll buy that. 
 Hi
  Interesting! I've always considered order of execution
 to be one of the fundamentals of being able to predict
 what a computer does. I've always thought of it as
 an accentual part of programming with predictable results.
  Each to their own I say.
 Dwight 
The section (and prior discussion) was related to writing code dependent on a 
compilers interpretation of order - as opposed to the programmers purposeful 
order.

Lyle 
 Sorry, I must have read it out of order :)
My point was that the language should always
have defined order, regardless of what the compiler
was interpreting. Maybe there is something basically
flawed in the concept of that method of interpreting!
 The basic concept of a computer language is to define
the operations you'd like done in order! I know that
one could break the sequence into several pieces to
enforce order but I consider it a serious flaw that
one has to be careful about how it interprets order.
I consider order to be one of the most fundamental
concepts of programming. Most everything else is just
nice features.
 I repeat, there are languages that do not have ambiguous
order issues.
Dwight