Goto [Was Re: Chown ???]

[jdow]

From: "Rick Stevens" <ricks at nerd.com>
Sent: Friday, 2009/April/10 12:00


> 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.

Call it "exception handling on the cheap."

{^_^}