Re: Problems/Risks ...

[jnixon@andrew.ATL.GE.COM (John F Nixon)]

kassover@jupiter.crd.ge.com (David Kassover) writes:
>Oh wow.  Another structured programming debate.  Sorry, I'm
>showing my age 8-).

me too... ;-)

>Ada is functionally complete without the GOTO.  There is no
>program that could not be written without it.

Of course, this holds for any language with sequential, conditional, and
iterative statements.  Like FORTRAN77.

>BUT in some circumstances the cost of programming around [an] unconditional
>transfer is high.

Do you mean the run-time cost, or the write-time cost?  I would
think that if you find the need to program around an unconditional transfer,
one should probably scrap the section in question and write it again
(with the proviso that error handling may require a goto to common cleanup
statements...).

>But doesn't C have a GOTO statement, too?

Yeppers.

>Not to mention the trinary operator, which helps produce unreadable one-line
>wonders, and by the way, compiles into inferior machine code using VAX C.

OK, I won't mention it... :-).  BTW, VAX C is an inferior conpiler, period.

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jnixon@atl.ge.com                    ...steinmetz!atl.decnet!jnxion