In <[email protected]>, on 04/21/2012
at 01:40 PM, Edward Jaffe <[email protected]> said:
>This is good general programming advice -- not just for COBOL
>programmers, but for for anyone writing in any modern compiled
>language.
As defined in Alan Sherman's song "Good Advice".
>The behavior of well-defined coding structures like IF/THEN/ELSE,
>DO, SELECT, CASE, etc. are extremely well understood--both by
>programmers and by code optimizers no matter which language is
>being employed. This is one of the chief reasons why structured
>programs are so much more maintainable than unstructured ones.
Use of those constructs does not make a program well structured, and
use of goto does not make a program ill structured. You have to carve
the bird at the joints.
>Every programmer understands a-priori how the control structures
>work
Which is quite different from understanding how a particular program
using the control structure works.
>without tedious inspection of the logic to understand the possible
>paths taken.
Understanding how the *program* works can involve tedious inspection
of the logic to understand the possible paths taken even if there is
not a single goto.
>Good compiler optimization depends on the compiler understanding
>what your code is attempting to do and structured, GOTO-less, code
>is FAR easier to optimize than its GOTO-laden counterparts.
That's an issue for ALTER and its equivalents in other languages, not
for the GOTO itself.
>Most modern languages disallow GOTO.
FSVO modern.
>IMHO it's usually better, even when programming in older
>languages, to avoid their use unless the language's control
>structures are truly insufficient to handle a specific,
>necessary case.
In most endeavors it's best to not use a hammer as a screwdriver.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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