Re: GO TO "cobol"

[Dale Miller]

Years ago, I learned my first programming language (FORTRAN) from an  
excellent book by Daniel McCracken who was justly famous for his  
excellent programming books. He was also known, (but not quite as  
well) for a mid-life crisis which involved completing a degree from a  
seminary, but never getting ordained, if my memory serves me. His  
popularity peaked around the time of the big push for structured  
programming, and I attended a discussion by him of structured  
programming. He was positive about it, but with a few caveats. I do  
remember his saying (approximately):"Pity the poor COBOL programmer  
working on the error recovery routines for Indexed-Sequential file  
handling, who finds himself 5 levels deep in nested PERFORMS, and is  
heard to shout as he sinks beneath the waves: 'Just one GO TO!'.".
Looking at the situation where there are multiple conditions under  
which a procedure/block should terminate, if one is forced to follow  
the stricture of a single exit from a procedure, one is forced to  
choose between a convoluted set of nested if's or using goto's to the  
single exit point. The use of goto's could be considerably easier to  
follow, especially in the case of the original non-structured COBOL  
where PERFORM's would be necessary.

Dale Miller
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