Goto [Was Re: Chown ???]

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 20:22:53 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 12:00 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 10:32 -0500, Dave Ihnat wrote:
> >> The purpose of deprecating use of goto was to avoid the spaghetti code
> >> that was so prevalent, especially in C.
> > 
> > <Bzzzt>. Close but no cigar. The problems with Goto were pointed out by
> > Dijkstra in his famous 1968 letter to CACM "Go To Statement Considered
> > Harmful", which is several years before C appeared on the scene. (Note
> > also Knuth's 1974 rebuttal to Dijkstra "Structured Programming with Goto
> > Statements"; old controversies never die, they just fade away).
> > 
> > C programmers are not notable users of goto's in my experience. In fact
> > the use of goto is pretty unusual (unless you consider break and
> > continue to be disguised goto's).
> > 
> > Don't worry, you can still write illegible code without using any
> > goto's.
> 
> Actually, K&R sanctify the use of GOTOs since "there's no multi-level 
> break defined in C." or words to that extent.

True, but this is quite rare.

poc




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