'goto" gone from computer languages or is it!

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Paul Koning" <pkoning at equallogic.com>
>
>>>>>> "Dwight" == Dwight K Elvey <dwight.elvey at amd.com> writes:
>
> >> From: "Lyle Bickley" <lbickley at bickleywest.com>
> Dwight> ---snip--- The first sentence in
> >> the final paragraph reads: "The moral of this discussion is that
> >> writing code which depends on order of evaluation is a bad
> >> programming practice in any language."
> >> 
> >> I'll buy that.
>
> Dwight> Hi Interesting! I've always considered order of execution to
> Dwight> be one of the fundamentals of being able to predict what a
> Dwight> computer does. I've always thought of it as an accentual part
> Dwight> of programming with predictable results.  
>
>That's true for a single CPU sequential computer without any
>interrupts going on.  It isn't true if you run things in parallel on
>several CPUs.  It may not be true in multi-issue computer (which is
>most modern fast CPUs) if the architecture has sufficiently relaxed
>ordering rules.
>
>But all that applies to the hardware.  Many programming languages
>don't specify a single order of doing everything in every possible
>program, but instead leave things partially unspecified, so the
>translation from source code to machine language has more
>opportunities for optimization.  So even if a machine is fully
>sequential and fully ordered, the high level language programs you
>feed it might not be.
>
>     paul

Hi
 The last place I worked, the processor was designed to
be able to optimize by doing out of order execution ( HaL
computer system, first Sparc64 ). They soon discovered the
problem when dealing with I/O. They, luckily, had a
sequential mode that they could switch to during I/O
operations that made the order predictable. You'd have
thought that someone in the design team might have realized
the problem.
Dwight