Oh puleeze. Edsger was a very nice guy, but he was hardly one of the most brilliant minds in computer science --- and he certainly would have disapproved of Perl, whose author truly is a giant. Djiskstra hated "one-liners" -- since his main interest was mathematical proof of correctness, he promoted structured programming: a hierarchy of modules, each having a single entry and a single exit point, and in which control is passed downward through the structure without unconditional branches to higher levels of the structure. Three types of control flow are used: sequential, test, and iteration.
While I'm being blasphemous: the inventor of C, Dennis Ritchie (also a Turing Award winner) was another real giant; and he and Thompson thought Stroustrup's C++ sucked. All the important OO concepts of abstraction, localism, etc were practiced by good C programmers well before C++, and neither C++ nor OO Perl can prevent stupid programmers from writing horrible code, goto's notwithstanding. Nor does an obsessive aversion to goto, continue or last indicate much other than OCD itself. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of John Deighan > I think that it's absurd to claim that work done by Edsger W. > Dijkstra, one of the most brilliant minds in Computer > Science, has been discredited by someone with lesser > credentials. The only case where I think that a 'goto' is > justified is when no other alternative is available in the > language you're using (usually a failing of the > language) that is as computationally efficient, and > computational efficiency is a major issue (it usually isn't). > I've used it, but only in a very few cases. _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list Perl-Win32-Users@listserv.ActiveState.com To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
