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From: Randy Dunlap <rddunlap@osdl.org>
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Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 16:38:52 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: any chance of 2.6.0-test*?
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> On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 14:38, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> I think goto's are fine
>
> You're a relatively succesful guy, so I guess I shouldn't argue with your
> style.

Good.  (although I don't know why I'm replying as this thread
is way overdone....:)

> However, I have always been taught, and have always believed that
> "goto"s are inherently evil.  They are the creators of spaghetti code (you
> start reading through the code to understand it (months or years after its
> written), and suddenly you jump to somewhere totally
> unrelated, and then jump somewhere else backwards, and it all gets ugly
> quickly).  This makes later debugging of code total hell.
>
> Would it be so terrible for you to change the code you had there to _not_
> use a goto and instead use something similar to what I suggested?  Never
> mind the philosophical arguments, I'm just talking good coding style for a
> relatively small piece of code.
>
> If you want, but comments in your code to meaningfully describe what's
               or put
> happening instead of goto labels.
>
> In general, if you can structure your code properly, you should never need a
> goto, and if you don't need a goto you shouldn't use it.  It's just "common
> sense" as I've always been taught.  Unless you're
> intentionally trying to write code that's harder for others to read.

There are goto-less languages, even Algol-like ones.
And OSes can be written in them.
Well, they just have different names for JUMP.

~Randy



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