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Old 24th May 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nero View Post
Laugh as much as you wish, but I still use Mumps, Snobol, FORTRAN and APL for little home projects.
Well designed & well implemented code using older tools is a whole lot better than bad code slapped together with trendy tools. Ultimately, it comes down to getting the best out of what tools are available, & this comes from knowing the tools through experience.
Quote:
'Never have understood why GOTO is such a bad thing. Cheers to your choices from an old fart.
As opposed to the platitudes taught in schools, goto has its place, however, it takes significant time to develop the insight needed to know when to use it in a disciplined manner. Paraphrasing Dijkstra, gratuitous use of goto doesn't scale well, & it can make the maintenance job of the next guy inheriting the code a living hell. Given that most code ends up being write-only (It only made sense to whoever wrote it...), & given that most code lives in a maintenance phase, it behooves programmers to have a solid reasoning for using it. If you are maintaining your own code, then you understand why various decisions were made.

As for my experience, I can't recall that I have intentionally used goto's in original code, but I have perpetuated the practice when extending the work of others.
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