On 04/14/2017 07:19 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
On Fri, 14 Apr 2017 11:44:59 +1000, Steve D'Aprano
<steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> declaimed the following:
Even that's not enough for some. Donald Knuth, who supports the use of GOTO
under some circumstances, maintains that any program using GOTOs should
have the invariant that its flow chart can be drawn with all forward
branches on the left, all backward branches on the right, and no branches
crossing each other.
Good thing I never had him for an instructor... My practice, when last
flow-charting, favored back-branches on the left.
After all, I read left-to-right/top-to-bottom, so forward branches
going right and down seem natural. Encountering a branch going left sort of
implies "re-reading" part of the chart; going upwards...
Yeah, but I love the naked concept there. It pretty much encapsulates
what I find to be the only useful use of GOTO in any reasonable language
in a simple, easy to visualize way. If your GOTOs are crossing you've
done something wrong.
If more people had good mechanisms for visualizing their code I'd use
far less profanity literally every day of my life.
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Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order. See above to fix.
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