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From: billy@cast.msstate.edu (Billy Chambless)
Subject: Re: Programming language vote - results
Date: 1997/12/03
Message-ID: <663v05$a09$1@NNTP.MsState.Edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 294874560
References: <343fbb5a.0@news.iprolink.ch> <3470EF6E.F74@lysator.liu.se>
 <879863453snz@genesis.demon.co.uk> <t6Le5BAnmde0EwO$@dowie-cs.demon.co.uk>
 <65gaoj$f8u$1@helios.crest.nt.com> <6616ej$llt@fstgal00.tu-graz.ac.at>
 <881106132snz@genesis.demon.co.uk>
Organization: MSU - Center for Air/Sea Technology
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.apl,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1997-12-03T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <881106132snz@genesis.demon.co.uk>, fred@genesis.demon.co.uk (Lawrence Kirby) writes:
|> In article <6616ej$llt@fstgal00.tu-graz.ac.at>
|>            nozone@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at "ANDREAS LEITNER" writes:

|> >Once we got a
|> >"coder" that produced lots of gotos, he was fired not onyl because of gotos
|> >but also because of the fact that a different programmer was able to rewrite
|> >a function without using one goto and also reducing the size of the function
|> >from 60 to 15 lines (as I remember correctly)
 
|> In that case the goto's were just a symptom, the programmer simply didn't
|> know how to program well. He/she would most likely have managed to write
|> bad and inefficient code in a language that doesn't support goto.
 
Indeed. While goto is, in K&R's words, "infinitely abusable", many other
common programming language features are infinitely abusable. The
programmer mentioned sounds incompetent; if you take goto's away from
an incompetent programmer, they'll just find some other feature
(pointers, for instance) to abuse. ;)

GOTO is infinitely abusable, but so is the C-style switch statement,
operator overloading, polymorphism, etc.

|> I think many people avoid goto entirely now simply because of peer pressure.
|> To actually type the word in their code would bring them out in a cold
|> sweat! :-) This isn't a response based on reason however.

Yup. CS grads especially, have had a religious prohibition of GOTO beat
into their head.

|> Even in languages that don't support structured constructs to nay great
|> extent (so you can't seriously avoid using goto) you can still write in
|> a structured way. It just takes discipline and a degree of knowledge of how
|> to go about it.

Exactly. One can write structured FORTRAN or BASIC with a little
effort... or, for that matter, spaghetti Ada or C++.