Donn Cave wrote:
> In its day, goto was of course very well loved.
No, it wasn't. By 1966 or so, "GOTO" was starting to look
like a bad idea. It was a huge hassle for debugging.
It took another decade to get the iteration constructs
approximately right (FORTRAN was too restrictive, ALGOL
was too general), and to deal with problems like the
"dangling ELSE", but it was clear quite early that GOTO
was on the way out.
There was a detour through BASIC and its obsession with
line numbers ("GOSUB 14000" - bad subroutine call construct)
that took a while to overcome. Much of that was from trying
to cram interactive systems into computers with very modest
capacity per user.
John Nagle
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
