Since goto is getting so popular these days....

[kevinnicol]

Unless the sentence is "how to elegeantly fire that coder who keeps using goto's in his code."

[Tomz_KV]

"GOTO" is a good statement in sql that cannot be easily replaced.

TOMZ_KV

[Pete OHanlon]

While I would not normally consider using the force for negative purposes, I'm seriously considering making your lower intestines leak out of your left ear just for suggesting it.

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

[Christian Graus]

I've NEVER held a religious view about goto. I do agree that overuse can make code unreadable. I've never used goto in my code, in 12 or so years of programming, because it's never been the best solution.

Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

[Tom Delany]

I've heard some claim that it is valid if you're writing a state machine. Personally, I avoid goto like the plague!

WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated. There are 10 kinds of people in the world: People who know binary and people who don't.

[Mark_Wallace]

Is the goto becoming popular? How silly. It's just a tool, just like any other keyword used for a predefined function. Mind you, I'm still pissed off that the C+ chaps refused my demand to have the return statement keyword changed to "otog" -- symmetry is so important in programming; it makes everything more understandable.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

[Mike Marynowski]

If you look at the state machine class that is automatically generated for a method that uses the C# yield return keyword, you will find goto statements. I think it would be brutally messy to implement otherwise.

[BillWoodruff]

One-time-only, or occasional, use of 'goto will simply intensify the awareness of the Hell you are already in, but if used recursively, 'goto renders you fully aware of said Hell, and thus unable to reboot your consciousness. best, Bill

"Many : not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because it [the Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, its processes must consequently be arithmetical, numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine numerical quantities as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly." Ada, Countess Lovelace, 1844

[Rob Grainger]

Busog shurely

[Mark_Wallace]

Please don't call me Shurely.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

[rastaVnuce]

Why the bunch of univotes? Geeezzz... Guys.. joke, you know... the thing you do / say to have a laugh? I know some don't understand that concept, hence the Joke icon... :doh: Aaah... goto hell!

We are using Linux daily to UP our productivity - so UP yours!

[Gary Wheeler]

Christian Graus wrote:

I've never used goto in my code, in 12 or so years of programming

The last time I used goto was back in the early 90's, and then it was because exception handling wasn't implemented by the tool chain I had at the time.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Fabio Franco]

Never used GOTO writing MS-DOS batch files? Ok, I was 15 years old, but still, by then it was reasonable.

[pboucher]

lol, completely agree with you on this one.

Pierre Boucher 'Bien souvent on se rend coupable en négligeant d'agir, et non pas seulement en agissant.' - Marc Aurèle, empereur et philosophe romain.

[Carlos Adriano Portes]

Event though I do not use it I've heard it is useful in some scenarios since it does not backtrack the method execution, it was used in the past on single entry single exit methods.

[tsafdrabytrals]

No, you will not go to hell. You will go blind though.

[jsrjsr]

But you will spend a century in purgatory...

[Kenneth Kasajian]

Ignore people who say goto is bad. Don't use goto when it's bad. It should be clear to you when that is. Don't use goto when there's already a language construct that can be used *just as easily*. One place where I use goto without apology is to simulate a finally clause when exception handling is not part of the language, or is non standard. For instance, in C. It's a matter of style, but I prefer the second version below: BEFORE:

void far()
{
int error;
Resource *r1 = NULL, *r2 = NULL, *r3 = NULL;

error = somefunc1(...., &r1);
if ( !error )
{
    ....
    error = somefunc2(...., &r2);
    if ( !error )
    {
        ....
        error = somefunc2(...., &r3);
        if ( !error )
        {
            ....

            free( r3 );
        }

        free( r2 );
    }

    free( r1 );
}

}

AFTER:

void far()
{
int error;
Resource *r1 = NULL, *r2 = NULL, *r3 = NULL;

error = somefunc1(...., &r1);
if ( !error )
    goto error:

....

error = somefunc2(...., &r2);
if ( !error )
    goto error:

....

error = somefunc3(...., &r3);
if ( !error )
    goto error:

....

error:
if ( r1 )
free( r1 );
if ( r2 )
free( r2 );
if ( r3 )
free( r3 );
}

Yes, the second form can be constructed without the goto, by using a gated if along the way, but having all the clean up code in a single place is a nice feature.

ken@kasajian.com / www.kasajian.com

[Dan Neely]

will C let you use error as both a variable and a label?

3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

[Jeff Connelly]

"It messes with flow in a pretty unreadable way"? Really? You find a goto statement unreadable? It really doesn't get much easier to understand than a goto statement. As easy, or easier, than a function call (a function call could be in a place further away in the code, and thus slightly harder to track down, while a goto, if not done poorly, will be very close by.) This gets pretty silly. There's nothing inherently wrong with goto. This comes from efforts in the distant past to clean up spaghetti code - one of the tenets of "structured coding". From wikipedia: "Donald Knuth accepted the principle that programs must be written with provability in mind, but he disagreed (and still disagrees[citation needed]) with abolishing the GOTO statement. In his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements", he gave examples where he believed that a direct jump leads to clearer and more efficient code without sacrificing provability." There's another "rule" to have only 1 exit point from a procedure. Yet this can lead to badly structured (unreadable, unmaintainable), deeply nested if statements, especially where return code and error handling are concerned. Lacking a quick "return" call, I think a "goto" to an exit line would be appropriate. switch statements are glorified gotos, as are multiple return statements (just debug the procedure if you doubt that :-) )