On Jun 7, 2005, at 8:12 AM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
GS>>And yet it exists and people use it productively - so you've
GS>>successfully undermined your own argument (and Perl's goto is
far more
GS>>flexible|evil than the one proposed for PHP).
Care to give example where it is really needed and can't be trivially
reduced to labeled break?
Perl's goto has a number of features that the proposed one does not,
for instance the ability to jump out of scope. This is necessary
when using AUTOLOAD in Perl for altering the callstack to not reflect
that you were just in AUTOLOAD, but were in the overloaded function
instead. It's a standard (albeit advanced) Perl idiom.
Very few things are really unnecessary. Is the functionality
supported by ifsetor() necessary? Is the ability to use assignments
in conditionals necessary? Is the existence of switch() as a
language construct really necessary? All of these can be trivially
implemented with other language primitives. PHP is full of syntactic
sugar that makes common tasks easy, and gives people the ability to
solve problems in the way they see fit.
The point isn't whether or not you see Perl (or C's) goto as useful
or not. The point is that other people do, and neither has caused
the ruinous demise of either language.
As for my own example, many state machines make extensive use of goto
to avoid recursive calls.
George
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