Re: Programming language vote - results

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

<<Well, in my opinion the need to use a goto is in most (if not all) cases a
sign that the design or the language lacks. (if (!design lacks) language
lacks; :)
I think goto debate is not recent anymore is because the majority of people
have accepted the fact that goto provide unreadable code. 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)


I think this is the main reason why the goto-argument is not held anymore
(or is it help by now?)
>>


I certainly don't want a rerun of the goto debate, but you should know that
the above absolutely stated opinion is rejected by many people. It is 
certainly not the case that all gotos produce unreadable code. Good
programmers often use a goto to improve the readability of the code (indeed
that is the only reason for using gotos). A common exception for many
people is that finite state machines are sometimes more easily represented
with code using gotos.

If this thread starts again, one hopes it does not, nothing new will be
said, but you will see that the bottom line is that *some* people agree
that gotos are evil and should never be used, but many people (including
for example Wirth and Knuth) don't have this allergic reaction to gotos,
and find useful uses for them.

Note that the fact that the design of Ada 83 contains the goto, and that
noone suggested putting the goto into annex J in Ada 95, should indicate
that the sentiment that gotos are *sometimes* useful is widespread.

Yes, of course we all know that an excessive use of gotos is a bad thing.
So is an excessive amount of almost anything, e.g. salt, but that does
not mean you should ban salt!