Re: (tye)Re: GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?

[RMGir]

in reply to (tye)Re: GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?
in thread GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?

It also avoids arguments with people who can't handle goto.

I'd agree with you, except I ran into at least one developer who thought that returns from the middle of subroutines were just as unreasonable as goto's. :)

I'm in the "if I can understand what it's doing, it's fine" camp, myself. The goto in the original message was pretty clear, as is your example.
--
Mike

[Anonymous Monk]

Linked from the previous discussion you will find Loop Exits and Structured Programming: Reopening the Debate which does a very good job of explaining why returns from the middle of subroutines and loop exits are a good thing.

[RMGir]

You seem to have misunderstood my position...

I wasn't saying they were bad, I was just saying I'd worked with someone who thought
a) goto's BAD, no exceptions
b) return from middle of subroutine == goto.

That's NOT my position at all. I believe in _necessary_ gotos, and don't mind return/redo/last/next at all, as long as they're not used to cause chaos :)
--
Mike

[Anonymous Monk]

I didn't misunderstand. I was just not clear enough.

I meant that to be a resource you can use in discussions with people whose understanding of structured programming is more religious than practical.

As for goto, very few are "necessary", and experience says that so-called necessary gotos generally have a better replacement. Furthermore the ability to combine loop control and named loops removes the vast majority of goto statements - including every one that Knuth pointed to in his rebuttal as being useful for algorithmic efficiency. So while I might agree that necessary gotos are OK, I likely mean something different by that than you do.