🚀 go-pugleaf

<halasz@caip.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>In article <1995Aug2.080237.17479@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>, A.Main@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Zefram) writes
>+ ....
>+ int fn() ret
>+ {
>+  if(some_error_condition()) { ret=-1; goto end; }
>+  /* ... */
>+  end:
>+ }
>+ 
>+ which is much more disgusting....
>
>which is much better, for there openlie is "goto", not one hidden
>under "return".

One might as well insist on rewriting all for loops using while, on the
grounds that the for is `hiding' a while.  In fact, for and while are
just hiding a few ifs and gotos!  We obviously must ban the use of
while, in order to make the gotos explicit.  And the structured ifs are
just hiding gotos too -- let's make goto the only statement that it's
legal to put in a conditional!  And ban else!  In summary, your
proposal naturally leads us to totally abandon structured programming,
in order to avoid implicit gotos.

By contrast, return -- which has relatively unstructured semantics --
won't always perform a jump.  In void functions it almost never will,
and on platforms where arguments and return values are passed in
registers very few functions will require more than one machine-code
instruction in the way of cleanup code.  The chances are, on such an
implementation, the code you prefer -- with a goto instead of a return
-- would be optimised to an actual return.  Coding it that way makes
much more sense.

-zefram