On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Steve Holdoway wrote:
But don't you miss Fortran 2 - computed gotos, no block ifs? I once wrote a little program to number my punched cards in cols 73-80 with the first 4 letters of the function and then a number. I got smacked when the function in question was called analysis...
No. I explicitly don't miss computed gotos. I loathed gotos and in particular hated computed gotos. I hated common blocks. Maintenance and bug nightmares the lot of them. Unfortunately the more things change.... the more people forget where they came from and why... and make the same mistakes! Global and static variables are just syntactic sugar on ye olde hateful Common blocks. Look in the guts of the linker and you find they're even implemented using the exact same mechanism even having the same name! "State Machines" are the embedded development flavour of the month? year? (god forbid) decade? but are nothing more than multi-threaded tangle of computed goto's with a roll your own scheduler in drag. :-)) (Oh dear... I have probably offended about half my colleagues. :-)) So I better add some fine print... "but can be useful in strict latency requirement systems having insufficient RAM to create a stack for each thread / State Machine." John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] New Zealand
