Re: No Go To's Forever!

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <38D947B9.6C50@synquiry.com>,
  Jon S Anthony <jsa@synquiry.com> wrote:
> I seem to recall that (at least in the "early days") the
designers
> put the goto statement in Ada due to a belief that there would
be
> a significant amount of machine generated Ada (presumably from
> much higher level problem descriptions).  Anyone with a clue
knows
> that in this case goto is mighty handy.


That's certainly a consideration, but if you recall that this
was the *only* reason then you recall wrong :-)

Jean Ichbiah is not goto-allergic, and agrees that there are
some legitimate uses. Once he was looking at some of my code
and asked what the gotos were there for. I said the magic
words "finite state machine", and he immediately agreed the
usage was not just acceptable but desirable. Encoding the
state into the PC is an efficient and easy to read and follow
representation of FSM's.

Actually relatively few people are completely goto allergic.
Wirth for example feels quite free to use an occasional goto
(see his coding of heap sort in the algorithms book).



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