[Coco] GOTO and code maintainability

[John Donaldson]

Aaron

   I  remember once after becoming a C programmer at the company I was 
working at, I signed up for some computer C programming classes at the 
local Community College. The prof would give us an assignment and I 
would sometimes turn it in using techniques that was far ahead of what 
he was teaching. He would always grade it low compared to a similar 
result from other students. It got so bad that I went to the Dean and 
complained. In the end he was forced to upgrade my grades. It seems some 
of the profs did not like their students being smarter than they were.
Later I took another programming course under a different prof. He gave 
extra credit for using advance techniques because to him you were not 
only learning what he taught but learning more by exploring on your own. 
He was always interested in your different approach to programming.

John Donaldson




Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Rogelio Perea<os9dude at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Aaron Banerjee <spam_proof at verizon.net>wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> All of us have at least at one point in time either used, or tried to
>>> figure out code containing GOTO statements.  In a recent programming
>>> environment I was in, GOTO (or it's equivalent in whatever language we
>>> happened to be programming) was expressly forbidden -- no exceptions no
>>> matter what.
>>>
>>> Just to be an irritant, I chucked a single GOTO (to make a polling loop) in
>>> a relatively simple program, which totally confused my colleagues.
>>>
>>> Given that it isn't abused, I don't see why GOTO makes code any less
>>> maintainable than other obviscation techniques, such as polymorphism (which,
>>> while useful, if abused can lead to very multiple inheritance or
>>> exception-based program control.  At least GOTO tells you where it is
>>> going....
>>>
>>> Has anyone else run into this type of "GOTO intolerance" while programming?
>>>
>>>                          - Aaron
>>>
>>>       
>> To be honest, I never understood the backlash GOTO suffered from structured
>> language evangelists, I felt it was to be taken as the one and only
>> source/cause of spaghetti code; that was the rhetoric from the uprising
>> Pascal and C community back in college (mid 80's for me)... my generation
>> had been brought up with TRS-80 Basic and 6800 ML assembly and that made us
>> all of the sudden the old guys who knew nothin' about programmin'.
>>
>> Same could have been said about the IF THEN ELSE construct with its implied
>> GOTOs, yet no one raised a ruckus over that... GOTO was the four letter word
>> to be wary about. Sigh...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -- Rogelio
>>     
>
> This thread has been interesting and lead me to read a few papers from
> the 70s/early 80s discussing GOTO.   In hindsight, it seems the
> movement against GOTO started with some very intelligent folks talking
> rationally about the merits of structured programming and somehow
> became distorted by less smart people into part of a general disdain
> for "amateur" or hobby programmers.  Maybe the established
> professional programmers and CS professors felt threatened by the
> increasing availability of computers to average folks.  BASIC is
> (mostly) unusable without GOTOs, BASIC was used by many of these new
> hobbyists, and the two become associated with spaghetti code and
> sloppy programming.
>
> I'm sure people did pick up many bad practices by learning BASIC
> mostly on their own (I know I did! :), and professors went from
> instructing people with no prior experience to these new students who
> thought they knew much more than they did (again, I sure did).   It
> probably irked the profs to see these kids using BASIC to explore what
> was previously their exclusive domain.  Telling these kids that a
> fundamental part of their prior experience was forbidden in "real"
> computer science had to be satisfying, even for those who knew this
> was a bit inaccurate.
>
> I think there is much truth behind GOTO being "considered harmful" in
> many situations, but this truth is not fully understood by most of the
> people who decry it's use.  Fear of GOTO has become wrapped up with
> general dislike of BASIC and all things "amateur".  Even today, Visual
> Basic is looked at with contempt by many (most?) professionals,
> despite being quite a capable language (and really nothing like
> BASIC).  Heck, I leave VB and VBA off my resume despite many years of
> experience with them.
>
> I'm sure amateurs are doing some horrible things in VB even as I type
> this. On the other hand, I've seen many awful things done in Java, C#,
> etc too (the daily WTF http://thedailywtf.com/  is very funny
> reading).  Something about the label "BASIC" brings out a tradition of
> dislike that seems to have been taught even to young programmers who
> never used the 8 bit BASICs that I grew up with.
>
> Ok.. ramble done, GOTO work.
> -Aaron
>
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>   


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