On Sat, Nov 02, 2024 at 01:59:03PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:

> Le 02/11/2024 à 00:39, Bob Proulx via Dng a écrit :
> >    I have always
> > considered goto to be a keyword of the damned but this causes me to
> > stop and think and consider that maybe I have been too harsh when it
> > is used appropriately.

>
>     There has been many critics about goto, up to the point to recommend
> never using it. It was obviously due to widespread abuse. I have seen some
> bad programmers horribly abuse of GOTO in FORTRAN. Some people then
> recommended even to forbid its usage.

I remember those days. It used to be that FORTRAN did not have any control
structures other than DO loops (with a label number to indicate where the loop
ended -- not even an END statemend), possibly conditional GOTOs, and computed
GOTOs.

There was no escaping the use of GOTO statementsin anything even slightly
complicated. All those years I was longing for Algol 60's if-then-else,
while loops, and recursive function calls, but they were simply not available.
I was stuck with tangles of GOTOs. I reacted by implementing a Lisp
interpreter in Fortran.

> But it is like everything, to use
> moderately, when apropriate. A simple goto may avoid a horrible nesting of
> loops.
>
> --     Didier
>

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