blakemor@software.ORG (Alex Blakemore) (01/20/89)
Re: the goto question
The most convincing argument I have heard in support of the goto
is that it could come in useful for tools that generate source code,
(e.g parser generators and a few others). Since the emitted code
is not generally intended to be maintained by humans, who cares if
it contains gotos ? Especially if it makes such tools easier to construct.
The important thing is that the source the programmer works with
have a logical structure (the .y file in yacc's case).
This sounded plausible, since I had seen several gotos in source
created by yacc. I looked a little closer and found nine gotos
which were all copied exactly from the standard skeleton parser driver, yaccpar.
The emitted code itself contains no gotos. So maybe the above argument
doesn't really hold.
Who believes we're still arguing over this in 1989 ?
Alex Blakemore
Software Productivity Consortium