Re (tilly) 2: Fear of Large Languages (was: "Would you use goto")

[tilly]

Um, that wasn't what I basically said.

The quote you are paraphrasing from goes:

I have not personally ever felt the desire to (other than in deliberate experimentation) use a goto in Perl for anything other than subverting the stack. However I remain aware that I could, and I would do it without hesitation if I thought the situation warranted it. I also doubt I will ever encounter such a situation, but I think I could likely spot it if I did...

Which means that I have used goto. In production code. For exactly what Ovid is doing, namely subverting the stack. While I wouldn't use a goto for that here, it is sometimes the right thing to do. An example is in an import method. Take a look at, for instance, Versioned modules. Why do I need to do it there? Quite simply because I need to remove myself from the call-stack so that an import method which knows nothing of me will export anything it exports to the correct package.

[dragonchild]

Actually, I have used goto in production when there was a perfectly good construct, namely the continue block.

(What, you had to click and find out what it did? Hrmmm... maybe goto is more maintainable from a knowledge standpoint.)

I had a large while loop that iterated over an array that was constructed earlier. I did some stuff, then had a set of if-then statements. Yes, I could've built this out to be a series of functions, but, as this was the meat of the script, didn't feel that was warranted. I did want to be able to "return" out of the first if-block and continue processing after the last else. So, I put a label up, called it DONE, and used goto quite liberally.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

[tilly]

This is a not uncommon use of goto in many languages. However if you follow the node at the top, you will find out that I pointed out to Ovid and TheDamian emphasized (with a pre-processor hack showing how to get them in C++), that Perl has a cleaner way to do this. Namely loop control combined with named loops.

So keep aware of the option of doing this with a goto. But remember in any language to look for named loops. If they exist, then that is a better solution to this problem.

[dragonchild]

while my $foo (@bars) {
    if ($foo =~ /baz/i) {
        goto DONE unless $foo eq uc $foo;
    } else {
        goto DONE unless $foo ne uc $foo;
    }

    DONE:
    do_more_stuff($foo);
}

This doesn't work with next or redo. It works with continue.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

[Anonymous Monk]

In such a case, it is generally more acceptable to spell goto as next or redo as needed, and the LABELs are often unnecessary as well :-)

[perrin]

Okay, thanks for the correction and example.