raymond@wish-bone.berkeley.edu (09/12/89)
Please, everybody. Before arguing about the merits of goto's, please
[1] Count to ten, and then to ten again.
[2] Go fetch your copy of "Structured programming with go to statements"
by D. E. Knuth (1972?) and read it. If necessary, find the person you
lent it to and ask for it back.
[3] If you still feel like arguing, go to step 1.
Thank you. We now return you to the regular comp.lang.c discussions
about null pointers, order of evaluation, and "I wish C had facility X".
--
Raymond Chen raymond@math.berkeley.edudjones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) (09/12/89)
[ "Added in proof" -- I just read this over and it may sound a little angry. I considered dumping it, but gee, all those keystrokes. .. So, just imagine that it's filled with smileys. I'm almost completely cured of getting angry. Yes, much better, now, thank you, although I do tend to relapse around mid April. ] From article <1989Sep12.004811.27855@agate.berkeley.edu>, by raymond@wish-bone.berkeley.edu: > Please, everybody. Before arguing about the merits of goto's, please > ... [ don't. ] Hey!! That was what I said, lo these many months ago. True, I obliquely suggested that it was arguable as to whether they were as bad as some people might think, (mistake number one), but my main point was that topic was just not worth the bandwidth it was getting at the time. The rest, as they say, is histrionics. You see, some of the, shall I say, "self-assured" net.pedants came down on me like a duck on a junebug, saying flatly that as a defender of the Evil goto, I was obviously incompetent and that software from the company I worked for was suspect. That really got my goat. There I was, playing with my employer's computer, and I had provoked some nitwits into impugning our product publicly. Never mind that they did not even know what we produce, they felt quite qualified and justified to judge, and eagerly cast the first, second, and third rounds of stones. Nobody came to my defense except for one nice man who very meekly pointed out that I had never said I endorsed or used gotos, only that they were not worth arguing about. Nobody took notice. I watched from the sidelines as a debate on gotos and quality assurance ensued. Being new to the net at that time, I was appalled. I wanted an apology. Knowing now the kind of rudeness that goes down daily on the net, it seems silly to have worried about it. In truth, it seems silly to have worried about it in any case, but back then I was a naive, headstrong youth of forty, and I wanted an apology. I asked for one publicly. Mistake number two. To apologize or not? A public trial had to be held! I didn't know about Knuth's paper. Without the force of Authority on my side, I could not appeal to the precedent from a higher court. Besides, I had never even said there WAS a proper place for the goto, so why should I have to defend it? I was tried and convicted in abstentia. With no one arguing for the defense, the Authorities In Residence pronounced me guilty. I was even more appalled to learn that my detractors thought that having judged themselves correct on "gotos" they had justified the abuse. They had determined that gotos were bad. Therefore what they said about my competence was true. Therefore defamation was justified. Therefore no apology. Case closed. I went away and sulked. It all seems very silly in retrospect. The reason I brought this up again is not just for mischief, honest. I just thought it ironic that at the time I was being bashed as a goto-slinging hacker, I had not one goto in all the code I had online, and there was a bunch of it. The other day I wrote one, so I thought I would share it with you, that's all.