Re: an infinate loop

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9j1u8a$863$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
>I have not used a goto in any language since at least 1983 - maybe longer,

Before this year, I hadn't used one since I quit using BASIC 16 years ago. I had
an occasion to write a small lexer in C (the classic "state machine" app), so I
tried it out that way.

I have to say that the result wasn't pretty. However, the alternatives; using a
huge multiply nested "if", or a "switch" in a loop with an enumeration
designating the state, would have been just as ugly, and would have taken more
CPU to achieve that equal uglyness. I could easily see where someone familar
with reading state machine code could make a case that the goto version was
indeed easier to read, but it still wasn't as readable as I generally like to
see my code be. I think the basic problem is that state-machine control flow
itself is ugly, and there just is no pretty way to show it.

So while I can't agree that "goto" inarguably makes this particular algorithm
look better, it at least doesn't make it worse, and it performs it slightly
quicker. I'm not sure that would normally be enough to justify its inclusion in
the language. However, I'd observe that this issue comes up a lot more for
compiler writers than for the rest of us, and compiler writers did create this
language. :-)

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