🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4gnbcp$biq@solutions.solon.com>, news@dcs.warwick.ac.uk 
composed...
>In code that I write, and see, every day, break is very commonly used
>to exit a loop.  In fact, I sometimes have a break being the /only/ way
>to exit a loop.  (Something like perl's split loop body would be a nice
>addition to the language.)  I don't consider it to be in any way bad
>style.
>
>What does this standard say about continue and goto?
>

I beg to differ.  break, used in the context of loops, is nothing more than 
a glorified goto statement.  If you have conditions that force a loop to 
stop executing why not just have a flag that is set when the loop is to 
terminate?  Sure, you have to go to the top of the loop (in the case of for 
and while) to test for the condition, but I would venture a guess that doing 
such will not cause your system to fail.

break is *never* the only way that a loop can stop executing.  There is 
*always* one or more conditions attached to the execution of the break, and 
those conditions may server, just as easily, to set the flag described 
above.

Please, no arguments like "my system has hard real-time constraints and 
can't afford the extra cycles" or "I have memory constraints and can't 
afford to set aside room for the flag."  If you have these arguments against 
using the flag, I'll *bet* that there are other areas of your system that 
need to be optimized.

-- 
Bill Winn
Software Engineer - Analysts International Corporation
-------------------------------
bill_winn@acm.org
My views do not express the views of anyone except my alter-ego.