Usage of goto's
Stephen Clamage
steve at taumet.com
Sun Sep 30 03:21:11 AEST 1990
ramsey at NCoast.ORG (Cedric Ramsey) writes:
|Hello once again peoplekind. I have a question about goto's. We all
|know that there usage is taboo in any language but what better way
|do we have to implement finite state machines. A switch statement ?
|All a switch statement is a goto statement, internally that is. So
|then, maybe it is okay to implement goto's for NFA's, DFA's, and
|transition diagrams.
Probably the best discussions on this topic were published in
ACM Computing Surveys
Vol 6, No 4, December 1974
If you have access to a CS library, go look up this volume. In one
paper, Niklaus Wirth shows why goto's are unnecessary, and in another
Donald Knuth shows why "absolutely no goto's" is a needlessly harsh
dictum.
I strongly recommend that anyone tempted to comment on goto usage
read these papers first. (They total more than 50 6"x9" pages.
I cannot provide copies, so please don't ask.)
--
Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve at taumet.com
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