goto???

Luis de Bethencourt luis at debethencourt.com
Fri Jul 17 06:21:26 EDT 2015


On 17 July 2015 at 11:00, Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> On Fre, 2015-07-17 at 15:55 +0800, Navy wrote:
> [...]
> > Goto is recommend in linux kernel programming, but it is despised in
> > many other situation. There are four rationable for using goto in
>
> "goto" is (usually totally) forbidden for beginners/inexperienced
> programmers because some of us are old enough to have started
> programming with Basic on the C64 (no functions there - just "goto" and
> "gosub") and know what may happen in the long run if you write more than
> a hello-world.c ...
> My usual answer to "when may or should I use 'goto'" is: You will know
> when it's time - before that, simply don't use it.
>
> >  Documentation/CodingStyle. Do you have some viewpoints about "why
> > goto" or "why not goto"? I'm glad to get your point.
>
> It mainly depends *how* you use it - see the patterns in the kernel for
> not so bad ones;-)
> And - as others wrote - rewrite the code without 'goto' and look into it
> after 3 months and decide which version is more readable/understandable.
>
> BTW that holds for all programming "style advices" (starting from "when
> should i factor out a function" over "how large should a function should
> be" and "too few or too many comments" to ...).
> It is like everywhere else: If the guideline is trivial to check, it is
> probably silly anyways.
>
> The big goal in (99,9% of) software development is: You want source code
> to be as easy to read and understand as possible - and nothing else!
>
> Coding style guidelines are just that: guidelines in that direction but
> never necessary nor sufficient to guarantee that (so the occasional
> violation for good reason - which one writes into a comment;-) - is not
> evil).
>
>         Bernd


This is an interesting article about the history of goto being considered
harmful; and how Dijkstra’s paper about it was misunderstood.

http://videlalvaro.github.io/2015/02/programming-myths.html

Luis
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