What is on Your Mind?

Yeah, BASIC goes out of my time span. I'll try to find that article.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/c...d_Harmful.html and see also Considered harmful - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I see! So in very simple terms, the letter does not criticize goto by itself. It criticizes programmers that used to over use goto on their programs because that could lead to a less structured and harder to maintain program. Although I can agree with that, I often see people criticizing goto even if it's only used in a structured basis like packing all errors and returns in the end portion of a function:

Code:

int
whatever()
{
        int error;

        do_stuff();
        keep_doing_stuff();
        if (!this_is_right())
        {
                error = EINVAL;
                goto err;
        }
        bla();
        if (this_is_wrong())
        {
                error = EPERM;
                goto err;
        }
        while (...)
        {
                stuff();
                if (stuff2())
                {
                        error = EFAULT;
                        goto err;
                }
        }
        ...
err:
        do_this();
        do_that();
        do_whatever();
        return -error;
}

The article was very influential for many years, and of course, contemporary Western culture and media can't remember the "unless used correctly" part of any criticism.

Let's see, C, perl, ksh/bash/sh, and thats it! Rather a limited list. I have written code in assembly and LISP, but that was when I was in college, so its not really worth mentioning.

And I can actually feel my C skills falling off, the reason being that I haven't written anything worth mentioning in over a year! Plus perl/shell scripting makes you lazy...

15 years ago I had to do some reverse engineering to rewrite in cobol85 a program written in cobol74...
I have heard a lot about NOT using goto like mad and spaggetti code, but never imagined what it could be like until that nightmare day where I was given thig challenge...
I almost went through depression after a week, and so had the help of the top analyst to play " Train " with me for a an extra week just to understand how the damn thing worked...

To give you an idea the goto started on the first line already, you had 400 lines of code
finishing with stop run on last line...

It took me 6 weeks to rewrite the program and almost 1200 lines of code.
But anyone able to read english can maintain what I wrote, and the reading of the first page you knew what and how it worked.
You just cant imagine how bad you feel when as a confirmed programmer you have been reading 3 pages of code not understanding whats going on and still have not seen the end.

OK I learned ( and forgot..) basic and basic clones PASCAL MANTISSE (Mainframe) COBOL

Somehow I missed this thread, but let me see, when Era said Basic : was that :
Was that the right syntax ? I think I've used it on Atari.... Boy, I started learning computers with this language, 17 years ago. Apparently, I don't remember anything now
Else, on the topic : perl and bash, this is what I use daily. I have some skills in reading and writing TCL/Expect code, and less Java, Python and C.