Re: Building an encapsulated library that uses GNAT sockets under Windows

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<ahlan.marriott@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:cf442cc4-8123-4815-8b49-ce1411ff4ed0@googlegroups.com...
...
> In the late seventies we were taught that gotos were evil and never
> to be used yet here they are, three and a half decades later, still using
> them - what a disgrace - have people no shame? ;-)

I hope the smiley face applies to the entire rant about Gotos.

When we discussed whether Ada should have a loop continue statement, the 
conclusion was that goto is good enough for such cases. They aren't common 
enough to justify adding a new kind of statement, especially one that can 
get lost (some people dislike deeply nested return statements, and 
"continue" would be worse). We even changed the syntax slightly to make it 
legal for a label to be the last thing in a sequence of statements.

That is:

     loop
          {some code}
          if something then
              goto Continue;
          end if;
          {more code}
     <<Continue>> -- Ada 95 requires "null;" here, Ada 2012 does not.
     end loop;

See AI05-0179-1 for details.

To completely eliminate the goto, one has to use a Boolean variable instead, 
or duplicate parts of the loop; both of those obscure what is going on more 
than the goto.

Moral: all gotos aren't bad. Coding standards that reject them out of hand 
are just like coding standards that reject exception handling or 
finalization out of hand -- deeply flawed.

                                      Randy.