Infocom on PDP-11

[John Foust]

At 10:12 AM 5/11/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>I miss GOTO.  It was unnecessarily expunged from the programmmer's toolbox
>by elitist academics.

It's a tool.  Why, I discussed this with a "Sam Ismail" back in 1999:

- John

>Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 16:00:07 +0000
>To: classiccmp at u.washington.edu, <dastar at ncal.verio.com>
>From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
>Subject: Re: Computers for children
>
>At 11:37 PM 1/14/99 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
>>
>>Remember, C has a goto statement, although I don't think in my nearly 10
>>years of C programming I've ever used it, although on certain rare
>>occasions it seemed the easy way out to a sticky coding problem. 
>> [...] but C really suffers from a lack of
>>a general error trapping mechanism that one can invoke to break out of
>>loops as required.  Sometimes I think goto's are the answer but I can
>>never find an appropriate way to implement it.
>
>I use "goto" in C on a regular and consistent basis for error exceptions:
>
>USHORT firstFunction( void )
>{
>USHORT lerr;
>
>    if ((lerr=secondFunction()) != TE_NOERROR) {
>        goto out;
>    }
>
>out:
>    return lerr;
>}
>
>The benefit is that all functions propogate an error code, any
>function can fail, and all functions clean up after themselves
>after their "out" label.
>
>- John