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Only banned under pointy-haired bosses, and only in source code | 400 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Stored pgm - Oracle v. Google Trial ~pj - McFadden, Parr, August
Authored by: matth on Friday, May 11 2012 @ 09:57 PM EDT
Banned in procedural code. The instructions in this case are bytecodes.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Only banned under pointy-haired bosses, and only in source code
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 11:02 PM EDT

Most real world computer architectures use some form of goto (computed and not computed) in their internal form. Until the 1960s it was also common for this to be done in high level source code.

Then an impractical computer scientist named Wirth published a paper called "goto considered harmful", followed by an avalanche of educational tools and toy languages to instill this attitude into millions of junior programmers all over the world.

As a consequence, some "pointy haired" manager types who only shallowly understand the tech have issued rules banning their more intelligent underlings from using goto and computed goto even when they cannot be efficiently replaced by "structured programming" notations such as while, repeat, if and for.

Experienced, intelligent programmers know and recognize when goto and goto-like constructs are more efficient solutions to a problem than the kludgy tricks needed to achieve similar results without them. And anyone who has actually looked at compiler output (and understood it), knows that all those fancy high level constructs compile to goto and computed goto anyway.

And as the other poster noted, if goto was mentioned in today's testimony at all (it wasn't, they discussed data access), it was about the compiler output, not the source code.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Stored pgm - Oracle v. Google Trial ~pj - McFadden, Parr, August
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 05:01 AM EDT
It's not risky, it's a code legibility issue. It's very easy to use goto
statements to create an unmaintainable nightmare ("spaghetti code").
Of course, it's not exactly hard to do that with other constructs either.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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