Re: Structure vs purism ?

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
21 Jan 1999 23:14:15 GMT

Followup to: <19990121144521.A24352@insula.conspiracy>
By author: Philipp Rumpf <prumpf@jcsbs.lanobis.de>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 09:58:53PM -0500, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > Then 'tidy' up something so it looks good to 'humans' and do the same
> > thing again. You will then learn why there are strange constructs and,
> > as you say, a 1000 gotos.
>
> I think a lot of the goto's could be removed as soon as there is a decent
> possibility to tell the compiler to optimize for a certain case. This was
> discussed on the egcs lists some time ago IIRC.
>

One thing: "goto" is really the only sane way in C to implement a
so-called posit/admit structure, which *is* recognized by structural
programming -- you assume that it is going to be OK, but need to do
cleanup if you bail. Sometimes an early return or "return do_cleanup();"
is acceptable, but if the function needs to do cleanup using local
variables, then there is no real choice.

-hpa

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