Re: No Go To's Forever!

[Chris Morgan <cm@mihalis.net>]

"Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com> writes:

> While I will concede that there are times when a goto might make sense,
> I'll say this much: I have been writing software in Ada since the
> original standard was published and it must total up to millions of
> lines of code by now. Not only have I never once used the goto (except
> possibly in experimental code designed to illustrate its use) but I have
> never once encountered it in a fielded, working body of code.

Do not ever enter HMS ImNotTellingYou. On that boat, IIRC, there are
programs made from hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lines of
Ada with a high density of gotos. They naturally express a state
machine for each concurrent application process. The design says "I go
into a loop, I read my input buffer and process these messages until
some condition terminates the loop". The implementation makes that a
function which is called with the next message. Loops that persist
over several invocations of a function obviously have to be "faked"
one way or another. A goto is as good as and possibly more honest than
any other way.

-- 
Chris Morgan <cm at mihalis.net>                  http://mihalis.net
    "O gummier hum warder buffer-lore rum 
     Enter dare enter envelopes ply"