'goto' - the debate between 'human' vs 'machine' programming

Jim Leonard trixter at oldskool.org
Mon May 16 16:27:23 CDT 2005


Cmurray wrote:
> The folks who deplore GOTO are the 'Structured Programming' folks.  Who have
> a lot of flavors and attempts at 'structured programming' behind
> them now, and keep chugging along.  It's about sociable coding, as opposed
> to asocial 'solitary' coding.  Which is important.  

Agreed, but if the "structured programming" folks don't want GOTOs, then they 
should simply endorse languages that don't contain them keep quiet about 
languages that do.

I've always thought the "GOTO" argument was dumb.  It's just a construct to 
affect the flow of the program -- a branch made after a decision has been 
reached.  I'd like to think that people who are against GOTO are against bad 
programming and not the GOTO statement at all.

I find it funny that the same people who are against GOTO have no problem with 
"exit" or "break" in Pascal (which allows breaking out of a loop before the 
initial loop conditions are met) or JMP in assembler -- both are "GOTOs" in 
functionality and, in the case of "break", can be just as abused.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project?             http://www.mobygames.com/
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