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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Re: Teaching students with GOTO
Message-ID: <179@scc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-May-84 14:54:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: scc.179
Posted: Thu May 31 14:54:01 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Jun-84 19:34:48 EDT
References: <5806@mcvax.UUCP> <26400011@uiucdcs.UUCP>, <1076@ritcv.UUCP>
Organization: Santa Cruz Computer, Aptos, Calif.
Lines: 33

***
>> Now I am not a liberal user of goto's, but I do object to impossing this kind
>> of rule unless there is a corresponding rule that the instructor will never
>> give any assignments in which goto's may be used appropriately.
>> Daniel LaLiberte (ihnp4!uiucdcs!liberte) 
> 
> When you are little, you get lots of similar rules (Don't go in the
> street) that are later modified when you are better able to deal with the
> subtleties involved (Look both ways before crossing the street).  I submit 
> that the same technique makes sense when learning programming.
> 	Ken Reek, Rochester Institute of Technology
> 	{allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!kar

	I posted the original article Dan is responding to.  It said that
in my first programming course my instructor forbade goto's completely.
I agree with Ken.  I moved from Alogol to C and never used goto's for many 
years.  I was not even sure what they did.  Later I read "Software Tools" 
to learn Fortran.  Still later I learned some assembly languages and 
assembly language programming.

	I have always been biased toward believing that 
goto's provided a clumsy way of implementing conditional statements, loops 
and other such things in languages that did not have these constructs.
Today, as a professional programmer, I am glad I was given the bias
I was.   Using such a restrictive rule at first became an
organizing principle for my later learning.  


				Don Steiny
				Personetics
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