karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) (03/03/90)
In article <1004@micropen> dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) writes: >What break does is *very* well defined and is no more prone to >misinterpretation that any other non-linear control flow statement ... Yes, it's well defined, but what it's defined to do is bad. For a formal treatment of the above statement, I refer you to my article <16039@haddock.ima.isc.com>, posted to comp.lang.misc (also .c and .ada) with this same title. I haven't seen any rebuttals yet. >A multi-case switch is very handy in many situations ... Yeah. I wish C had this feature, instead of simulating it with fallthrough. >That you ask the question of the usefulness of break-per-case/multiple-cases >implies that you haven't sufficient experience with the construct to judge >its merits/weaknesses. I don't know about the person you were addressing, but I think I've had sufficient experience with it. I certainly question its usefulness in comparison to something reasonable, like the language I described in my other article. In fact, even if you insist that the comparison must be between C and plain-C-without-break-switch, I think I'd still go for the latter. I believe the benefit of not requiring an overloaded keyword to do a break-switch exceeds the cost of having to use a goto to merge related cases. Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint