Re: Simple question!

From:
"Bo Persson" <bop@gmb.dk>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:32:16 +0200
Message-ID:
<4hhd1eF1rqoqtU1@individual.net>
"Alex Blekhman" <xfkt@oohay.moc> skrev i meddelandet
news:OFi00NLpGHA.516@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...

I can see that many attribute some inherently evil properties to
`goto' statement. Michael K. O'Neill already posted good article in
this thread. I'd second his opinion. There is nothing wrong with
`goto' per se. All of us have seen horrible code without single
`goto'. This is not that `goto' (or any other language construct)
that makes code bad; it's quite the opposite: bad, stupid coders
produce filthy code (no matter what the language the use for that).
Any feature in a programming language is just a tool. Use it wisely
and you'll get beautiful elegant code. I just can't get all these
rumbles about `goto'.


Because it is an inherently unstructured way to get from one arbitary
point in the program to another? :-)

When 99.9% of the uses are bad, the general advise to students is:
"Don't use it"!

Frank Rubin is simply wrong! Even though he has found the break
statement, he doesn't see how to use it to avoid the goto.

His Pascal code:

for i := 1 to n
do begin
   for j :=1 to n do
      if x[i, j] <> 0 then
         goto reject;

   writeln('The first all-zero row is ', i);
   break;

reject: end;

could easily have been written (C++ style, 0 based array):

bool is_all_zero_row(int row)
{
   for (int col = 0; col != n; ++col)
      if (x[row][col] != 0)
         return false;

   return true;
}

// ...

for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i)
{
   if (is_all_zero_row(i))
   {
      std::cout << "The first all-zero row is " << i << std::endl;
      break;
   }
}

See Ma, no gotos !

As others have pointed out before, having to break out of multiple
loop levels is a good indication that the code can be refactored.
Having an is_all_zero_row attribute for the matrix seems like a good
idea, if that is an important property of x.

Bo Persson

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