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Goto and the folly of dogma

manybutfinite.com

4 points by gustavo_duarte 8 years ago · 2 comments

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eesmith 8 years ago

What good references on programming style assert this dogma?

Because it looks like a caricature of the topic, somewhat like how some Agile people incorrectly argue about how first there was waterfall and then came the Agile manifesto.

Just because a lot of people learned crap habits fourth-hand, doesn't make it a dogma. Dogma - real dogma - must be come from authority.

McConnell's "Code Complete", from 1993, has a checklist of "Unusual control structures" on p366 of my copy. This is much closer to what the real dogma of goto looks like:

[] Are gotos used only as a last resource, and then only to make code more readable and maintainable?

[] If a goto is used for the sake of efficiency, has the gain in efficiency been measured and documented?

[] Are gotos limited to one label per routine?

[] Do all gotos go forward, not backward?

[] Are all goto labels used?

Most of the CPython examples fit these criteria. I don't have experience with the other projects. My own use of goto also fits this form.

yipopov 8 years ago

Another example of this idiocy is the lack of goto in WebAssembly

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