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Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 1.8 KB

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From: Lawrence Kirby <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: GoTo equivalent in C ??
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 96 14:31:07 GMT
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In article <4d67vm$[e-mail]> [e-mail] "sukumar" writes:

>Hi,
>        I have always thought about this. How do you get the effect of goto
>in C without using "goto"?? For ex, if I have to check for an error in my
>function for every computation I do, and then do some cleaning up, how do
>I do it. Here is an example:

Error handling is an area in C where using goto can be the best approach.
Early languages such as FORTRAN 66 gave you little choice but to use goto
for many constructs. Then structured programming ideas became established
and there were lots of compelling arguments (Dijkstra is a notable name here)
as to why this is a much better approach than spaghetti code. However even
Dijkstra accepted that goto still had its uses and, indeed, with discipline
you can program in a structured way using goto.

>I don't want to use goto. what alternatievs do I have.
>Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Don't look for alternatives that make your code more complex and difficult
to follow. To be sure you very rarely need to use goto but there are
a few cases where the normal structured if/for/while/do constructs just can't
model the problem sensibly.

--
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Lawrence Kirby | [e-mail]
Wilts, England | [e-mail]
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