Re: No Go To's Forever!

["Michael P. Walsh" <mp_walsh@pacbell.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> I guess the burden here is to explain why the goto formulation
> is so horrible. Yes, it slightly discourages this control flow
> form, but that's probably a good idea, if you can avoid exit's
> and continue's in loops without doing damage to the code that's
> a good idea.

Is it so hard to say that the problem with the goto is not the goto
function, but what many people have done with it?

People are quite capable of writing good code in assembly
language, but it is likely to be quite hard to read and
understand unless it is well commented.

I spent many years as a Fortran programmer and started out
writing quite a bit of "spaghetti code".  Then I read some of
the articles on structured program and decided they made
sense.

I also note that you can write good structured code while
using goto's and write some very poorly organized code
without a single goto.

As far as this Ada newsgroup, I will note that this is a far
more general programming language discussion and
actually has little to do with Ada which, as mentioned,
does have a goto function.

Mike Walsh