Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/10/06/01:52:56
On Tue, 6 Oct 2015, Dave McGuire (mcguire AT neurotica DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> On 10/06/2015 12:07 AM, gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu wrote:
>>> list in the past several weeks are accomplishing little other than
>>> proving that there can be no consensus here.
>>>
>>> Personally I treat this a bit like the existence of "goto" in C: It is
>>> never, ever intended to actually be used in code. It is a "sign post".
>>
>> Do you have any reference on this? I mean a quote from the guys who
>> actually developed C and added goto in the first place? Or is is just
>> your guess?
>
> A "reference"? No, but your attempt to dismiss it as a "guess" will
> fail. I hate name-dropping, so I won't drop any names.
>
> It was presented to me as an opinion by a mentor and former employer
> of mine a long time ago, as he was teaching me the basics of C. Perhaps
> we can call that an "educated guess". ~30 years of C programming later,
> I've taken that opinion as my own. Perhaps we can call that an
> "experienced guess". So, during this conversation:
>
> http://www.neurotica.com/misc/DSC_0193.JPG
>
> ...I asked "one of the guys who actually developed C" about it and he
> concurred, with a hearty laugh.
>
> Close enough?
>
Nice.
On the other hand I did some search and my impression is, according to
quotes and books written by those guys, is that they didn't mean goto to
be never used. They rather meant it used with care. Wikipedia has a nice
summary on this:
'In their quasi-standard book on the C programming language, Dennis
Ritchie and Brian Kernighan warn that goto is "infinitely abusable", but
also suggest that it could be used for end-of-function error handlers and
for multi-level breaks from loops.'
So my impression is still that you generalize your opinion, this time
about goto, and imply other people have the same opinion.
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