On 31/01/12 20:23, Francesco Abbate wrote: [...] >> Gotos are also useful for code generation, particularly if one has >> some kind of #line pragma as well. > > I'm sorry but I don't agree on this point. Adding a bad feature like > goto to facilitate automatic code generation, this is a bad argument. Speaking as somebody who writes code generators a lot, if you don't have goto, you are *stuffed*. As far as I can tell it is simply not possible to flatten an arbitrary control flow graph to runnable code without goto [*]. The common control-flow structures in most languages --- while, do-while, if-then-else etc --- can't do it without storing extra state in a variable. The end result is that trying to translate code from a language which supports arbitrary control flow graphs to a language which doesn't becomes non-trivial. [*] I am, of course, including tail calls as a form of sanitised goto. But they're tough to use and can affect performance quite badly. Not as badly as faking a state machine using variables, of course. -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ │ "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by │ stupidity." --- Nick Diamos (Hanlon's Razor)
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