Re: No Go To's Forever!

[Paul Graham <pgraham@cadence.com>]

I think the goto implementation of the 'continue' statement is fragile
in the sense that it depends on the "<<continue>> null;" being the last
statement in the loop. A maintainer who wasn't familar with this idiom
might add statements at the end of the loop body, thereby breaking your
construct.

On the other hand, the continue statement in C is really best used in a
for loop, because you want some guarantee that the loop state will
advance. In a while loop it is all too easy for a misplaced continue to
create an infinite loop.

Paul

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> In article <38D8DFC2.778826FB@cadence.com>,
>   Paul Graham <pgraham@cadence.com> wrote:
> 
> > Why is there no 'continue' statement in Ada?  You've shown
> > that the function of 'continue' is desirable.
> 
> Yes, the *function* of continue is desirable, but on the other
> hand a continue is indeed a goto, so why not say so? That's the
> other point of view, and as you see from the previous post,
> some people find it clearer to use a goto here. We did discuss
> this in the language revision but there was insufficient
> support for this language addition.