Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!noao!arizona!sunquest!terry
From: terry@sunquest.UUCP (Terry Friedrichsen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: No goto's please (was Re: Fixing 7K pipes again)
Summary: ABSOLUTELY no goto's, please
Message-ID: <455@sunquest.UUCP>
Date: 2 Oct 89 18:09:50 GMT
Organization: Sunquest Information Systems, Tucson
Lines: 39

> tweten@gilmore.nas.nasa.gov (Dave Tweten) writes:
> I hope you are merely overstating you case, Dr. Tanenbaum.  I had
> thought the "No gotos" religion had died, mercifully for the rest of
> us.

I used to make the same kinds of arguments.  As an ex-FORTRANer, the GOTO
was definitely on my list of things that a language "needed" to have.

Then came the black day when the instructor of the computer science
course I was in announced "There will be two programming projects in
this course.  The first WILL be written in C, and the second WILL be
written in Pascal.  AND NO GOTOs!".  Now I thought that dictating the
programming language was unreasonable enough in itself (I can do this
in FORTRAN; leave me alone!), but to prohibit GOTOs was going beyond
the bounds!  But what could I do?

I wrote about 20,000 lines of code for that course, with nary a goto in
sight.  By the end of the semester, I didn't even miss 'em.  That was
10 years ago.  Since then, I have written hundreds of thousands of lines
of code in many complex logical situations (writing compilers, operating
systems, and network implementations), and have NEVER used a single goto.
My organic, pretzel-powered logic constructor now believes they don't
exist, and thus never puts me in a position where I need or even
want one.

This is the wrong forum for this discussion, and it's been beaten to death
in the forums for which it is appropriate, so I'll shut up.  But I wanted
to rebut and put this in front of those many programmers writing MINIX code:

	Dr. Tanenbaum is right:  please, no gotos!

Terry R. Friedrichsen
TERRY@SDSC.EDU  (alternate address; I live and work in Tucson)

(Reply with flames or send them to the above address.  All mail will be
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Disclaimer:  My company doesn't read my messages, so it can't possibly
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