OT? On Programming (was: Re: Computers for children) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

15 Jan 1999

On Jan 16,  3:05, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner 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. 
I think I've used it once -- and then removed it again.

...
    Perhaps it's my own biases here (coming with 9
years of solid C coding)
 but if you have more than one conditional test in an `if' or `while'
 statment, you may be doing something wrong.  Also, if you're so deeply
 nested that you need a `goto' to get out of trouble, then again, you may be
...
  doing something wrong.  If you are nested about four
levels deep in a
 function, you may be doing something wrong.  Don't be afraid to use lots of
...
  functions, each doing one thing and one thing only. 
This applies to any
 language really. 
This is definitely off-topic (who was that said I was single-minded?) but
for a fine example of bletcherousness, try the source to the pine mailer
(here also known as pain, or Pain In Neck Email).  Find the 70K source file
that handles the main mail stuff, and try 'grep goto' - and watch three or
four screenfulls scroll by.  All in one function (the 70K file is almost
all one function).

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York