🚀 go-pugleaf

volpe@bart.crd.ge.com (Christopher R. Volpe) wrote:
>In article <41t0sb$15e@news0.rain.rg.net>, Paul Long <plong@perf.com> writes:
[snip]
>>Besides the obvious readability problem,
>
>Do you mean the readability problems associated with goto statements that
>obfuscate what would otherwise be a simple return? Or do you mean the
>readability problems associated with nesting the main body of a function 
>inside several else-clauses that check for  terminate-now conditions?

I mean the readability problem that Steve McConnell describes in _Code
Complete_: "It's harder to understand a routine if, reading it at the bottom,
you're unaware of the possibility that it returned somewhere above." IOW, the
logic within a routine no longer flows completely from top to bottom.

[snip]
>Gotos are dangerous and abusable enough that I would rather take a
>chance on having to make a one-time change to remove multiple return
>statements, than indiscriminately inject gotos in all my code where I would
>otherwise use a non-abusable return statement.

Maybe you misunderstood me. I am _not_ proposing that gotos are a reasonable
alternative to multiple return statements. Both are bad and avoidable.

>I'm not saying there aren't good uses of a goto. There are. But when you see a
>goto statment, bells and whistles should go off in your head, because it's a
>source of potential trouble. The more one becomes desensitized to goto
>statements by frequent use, the less likely one is to notice bad uses, IMO.

I agree. Since I still have the book open, here's another quote from _Code
Complete_: "Even if gotos aren't confusing when used carefully, once gotos are
introduced, they spread through the code like termites through a rotting house.
If any gotos are allowed, the bad creep in with the good, so it's better not to
allow any of them."

>Therefore, I use gotos only when the alternative is less readable. This is not
>true for the general case of multiple return points.

We disagree.

-- 
Paul Long                               45:29:14N 122:48:09W
plong@perf.com                          http://www.teleport.com/~pciwww/
"Wagging head and tail, the red-tailed fish, unsupported, turns around."