Re: Why C++ is successful

[dewar@gnat.com]

<<Clarity is in the eye of the beholder. Circumstantial evidence here.uk>
has been that the original version though correct was opaque to a
fair proportion of readers.>>

The readers who produced wrong solutions wrote complete
nonsense, in one case
the program was not even compiled, and had an evident infinite loop. I
do not think that either of thes proved anything about the original,
but I do think that it showed that it is easy to mess up the attempt
to do this in a goto free manner. Actually I find it very odd that
USA programmers are so allergic to gotos.

<<Imagine a large program in that style... >>

But that's a meaningless argument. Arguing that you don't like someone's
green suit because it would be horrible if everyone wore green makes no
sense. No one is arguing for wide spread use of gotos in large programs,
so it is a useless rhetorical device to argue against this :-)

Perhaps the comment about goto-holic is the right comment. Those of us
who learned to program in a reasonable environment of Algol and Simula,
always knew that gotos were seldom needed. The most amazing thing about
EWD's letter, which merely pointed out an obvious fact known to all
competent programmers for a decade before his letter was printed, was
the huge reaction to it.

I think that the problem was that a generation brought up on Forgtran
and Basic, had never understood the idea that goto was something to be
used only occasionally.

So people avoid gotos very much like an alcoholic avoiding alcohol.
Sometimes even in a ludicrous manner, I have often seen COBOL programs
that did a PERFORM on a procedure that ended with STOP RUN, an obviously
bad choice compared to a GOTO (you can see the same thing in C where people
would never use a goto, but are happy to use exit).

Note as an example that in the book ALgorithms + Data structures = Programs
(or whatever the exact title is), Wirth is quite happy to use an occasional
goto when he feels that it will clarify the code. Certainly I would expect
EWD to be perfectly happy with Wirth's code in this book.

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