alex@cca.UUCP (Alexis Layton) (11/07/85)
In the most recent SIGPLAN Notices (Vol. 20, No. 11; November 1985) there is what I consider to be an excellent article by P. A. Buhr entitled "A Case for Teaching Multi-exit Loops to Beginning Programmers". While he does make several good points about why beginning programmers should learn these concepts, the bulk of the article is a very cogent argument about why languages should support a multi-exit loop construct. He differentiates between the common of use of C's "break" statement (and equivalent statements such as Ada's "exit") and a more syntactic loop-exiting statement which can only occur in the "top-level" (so to speak) of the loop body. While I primarily agree with his recommendations (and I hope new language designers are familiar with his reasoning), the kind of loop construct involved is too foreign to the style of C to integrate it in any way. I fear that attempts to use the preprocessor to enforce any kind of loop-like construct are doomed to produce confusing code. Alexis Layton Computer Corporation of America alex@cca-unix.ARPA decvax!cca!alex