Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:

On 21/11/2024 19:48, rbowman wrote:

I never understood the goto hate that Dijkstra had. It could be used
to produce hideous code but has valid uses. I'm amused by the
syntactic sugar used by many languages to conceal what is obviously a
goto under the hood amd of you dig far enough you get down to JMP,
JNE, and similar opcodes.

 
Yup.
>
The real hate was code that was hard to read and debug because flow
jumped about all over the place.
>
But you need to have conditional code execution and that means at some
level a goto, even if its implicit.
>
if(Bollocks)
{  // ELSE GOTO  next '}'
blah();
}

Dijkstra’s complaints were about the difficulty of understanding code
made of a spaghetti heap of explicit gotos. He was quite happy with
if/while/etc - his complaint is certainly not about conditional
execution etc.

He didn’t model the higher-level constructions in terms of implicit
gotos but that’s not really relevant to general discussion.

The one place I’ll use a goto (in C) is to branch to unified cleanup
code in an error case, usually using a macro both to emphasize what’s
going on and to stop the error-handling guff from dominating what the
reader sees.

For selective, conditional and repeated execution there are generally
cleaner ways to write it, and use of gotos for these purposes is
generally a hint that the code needs some work. More recent languages
have other options (‘defer’, ‘finally’, destructors, etc).

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/