> On Dec 30, 2017, at 7:46 AM, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at> wrote:
>
> On 2017-12-29 19:09:35 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>> On Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:12:22 +0000, bartc <b...@freeuk.com> declaimed the
>> following:
>>> Looking at 14 million lines of Linux kernel sources, which are in C,
>>> over 100,000 of them use 'goto'. About one every 120 lines.
>>>
>>
>> C is a language that predates the "structured programming" concepts of
>> the late 70/early 80.
>
> I don't think this is correct. Structured programming is much older:
> ALGOL 60 was already a block structured language and Dijkstra wrote
> "goto considered harmful" in the late 1960s. Pascal appeared in 1970, C
> in 1974. To me (who learned to program in BASIC on a CP/M machine), C
> is very much a structured programming language. If structured
> programming gained traction around 1980, it might even have been because
> structured languages like C with good performance became widely
> available.
>
> That said, C lacks exception handling (well, there is setjmp/longjmp,
> but ...) and multi-level break/continue, so goto is often the cleanest
> way to abort what you are doing and start to clean up. Python has
> exception handling, and that removes most of the cases where you would
> use goto in C (the rest is probably mostly in micro-optimizations: If
> you care about the run-time difference between a goto and a subroutine
> call, you probably shouldn't use Python in the first place).
>
> hp
>
I’ve been watching this discussion ebb and flow - and finally can’t resist
pointing folks here at the famous essay: “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal”.
It has its own Wikipedia article at this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don't_Use_Pascal
A copy of the original essay appears here:
https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html
Hopefully fun reading over a beer.
Bill
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