Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "why is it illegal to use "goto"?" video.

It annoys me when people group C and C++ together as though they're the same language. It was already easy to make a program that was valid in one but invalid in the other by C99, but now it's nearly impossible to not hit that wall. Java kind of pisses me off due to how little foresight they had in designing it. Not merely removing goto but making it a reserved keyword that generates an error at compile time, and then they had to add functionality to break and continue just to make up for the deficiency which caused a lot of problems that C++ already solved but in a more elegant way while still allowing you to use goto for those problems where it was still somewhat necessary. I guess what I'm driving at is that these ideological stances that people take based on inexperienced programmers misusing tools leads to garbage language design as well as garbage program design and I wish the lies that perpetuate them would stop cropping up. The old Knuth quote about premature optimization really irks me too.
59
@BilboSwagginsTheThird How about if the keyword were skip_rest_of_loop_resume_from_top?
8
@@bb-sky But it is telling it to continue, from the top of the loop. Though, I wouldn't be opposed to using next as the keyword to start the next iteration of a for loop, it wouldn't make sense in the context of a while or do/while loop, and in the interest of lowering the keyword count I'd delete the one that's the odd man out.
6
@DemoboyOot I suppose it's one of those cases of "a rose by any other name". In x86 assembly, jmp is an unconditional branch, the same as a goto, and absent some algorithmic recognition and optimization by the compiler, a goto on x86 machines will translate to a jmp. Break and continue are much the same, but don't jump to a label, instead they jump out of or to the top of a loop, respectively. Of course, the underlying action taken by the code isn't necessarily the same as how it was intended to be expressed. To use goto to replace break and continue, you'd have to add a label and it would be less clear at a glance what the code was doing.
5
@1sthaloman That's closer to the mark, but has other connotations that don't really meld with a single loop. It could very well mean restart the whole application, which might be a different kind of useful functionality.
4
@BilboSwagginsTheThird That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. I just don't happen to agree at all, either that continue doesn't make grammatical sense, nor that skip would.
4
@@bb-sky Interesting perspective. But you'll have to come up with a better word than next or skip to convince me. I can't think of a word that's more apt than continue, only phrases.
3
@BilboSwagginsTheThird I was being sarcastic because I don't like either option. Millions of programmers have already learned `continue` and have no problem with the slight grammatical difference. Using a new keyword at this point in the game, you might as well wipe out all of the preexisting language design. Although, if you wrote up a grammar for that language, I'd love to know what it looked like.
3
@MH_VOID Ah, I thought you were quoting someone and I didn't get the quote. It's an interesting choice to be sure. I'll have to mull over `again` as a keyword.
3
And again I'll say it. If you design a programming language based on what bad programmers do and are actively trying to stop them from doing it, you'll affect good programmers who use the same construct the correct way. Stop trying to prevent bad programmers from screwing up by making the programming language a pain to use.
2
I suppose that depends on whether you're writing an IOCCC entry or not.
2
In this instance, while I love C and I still think it's the best language, C++ actually provides a more elegant solution whereby the cleanup code goes into the destructor for a class so that if any part fails you could simply return from the function and the appropriate cleanup would occur. Even though I borderline hate Zig for the syntax choices they've made, I'll admit that defer is also a rather nice option and slightly more flexible.
2
If your determinant of what makes a good program or not is whether it uses goto or not, then you probably have some ugly code that performs poorly. Use the right tool for the job and stop making the world a worse place by perpetuating extreme ideology that leads to garbage code. If you have to use a goto, then do it, don't try to program around it by writing convoluted code that's hard to grok and thus harder to debug, and don't use inexperienced programmers as an excuse for why you write bad code.
2
@MH_VOID The problem is that skip can easily mean hop out of the loop right now, whereas continue means keep the loop going. Shorter isn't always better.
2
@ChapmanWorldOnTube The problem with that solution is that you then must unpack the variables from the struct. Whether they're passed on the stack, and thus take up valuable stack space, or passed by address while contained in a struct, it either requires extra space to be used up or extra syntax to be had. Both solutions are less easily understood at a glance, more difficult to type in, and potentially fraught with extra bugs, on top of requiring extra copying of values which in a long-running loop will add up. Now, if the compiler optimizes said functions because you label them static and use -O3, you still have harder to grok code with more potential for bugs.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube Did you mean Wirth? Surely not, because Pascal and Oberon both have such similar syntax to and design sensibility with C. Otherwise I have no idea what "Writhian" means.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube Well, for one, C doesn't have closures, but define begin as { and end as } and you're already halfway to Pascal. I wouldn't call that a particularly distinct syntax just that Wirth opted for key words instead of key characters. If you want to compare Object Pascal / Delphi to C++, then I'll agree with a designation of wildly different syntax.
1
@gregorymorse8423 Okay, write a compiler and optimize for that no matter how many levels deep the loops are nested and how far apart these test conditions are accounted for.
1
@gregorymorse8423 Okay, do it. Write your compiler and let's test how efficiently it generates code.
1
In strict terms, no one path is necessary as you can rework the code to your heart's content and make it amazingly convoluted and difficult to debug just by being an ideological drone that spouts nonsense like "goto is evil". That doesn't mean it's the best decision, and possibly not even a correct one, but you can do that if you like to leave the world a worse place than you entered it just for ideology. Or, and I'm just throwing this out there, you can use goto in places where it not only streamlines the code but improves the clarity of it and try to teach those that follow you the correct usage of the construct instead of telling them to use a worse solution.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube No, it's an ideology because all the arguments against using goto are invalid. Essentially it all boils down to saying you don't like the way a certain method of flow control looks and thus you hate on it and generally anyone who uses it. If you use any imperative programming language then hating goto is nonsensical. The only way to escape having the look and feel of goto is to use a declarative language, and even then it's still only thinly veiled due to the way a computer operates.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube And therein lies your problem. It's not a strawman, nor is it incorrect to synonymize readable and understandable. If you're organizing your code around a rats nest of gotos, then it's far more likely that your code is unreadable. However, I'm not saying and have never said that it's between using all gotos and no gotos, and quite frankly that's a strawman argument on your part to even suggest that. (We'll add sea lioning or motte and bailey if you want to argue you didn't mean what you meant.) You use the right tool for the job to get it done, and if you make it unreadable, then you've not done the job correctly. Oftentimes people will rearrange their code so that they can avoid using even a single goto when the rearranged code is less efficient and still harder to read. That's a waste of both the developer's time and the user's time. No amount of studies done on bad programmers misusing a useful feature will ever be a valid argument against that feature existing. It's the same as arguments where people want to remove someone's rights merely because an evildoer abuses their freedom and don't dare tell me it's for safety, because that's a canard.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube Right, so goto is bad, using a different word to achieve the exact same functionality isn't really goto and is therefore not bad. Maybe 80 years ago programmers weren't capable of graphing the structure of their code, but we certainly can now, and I'll say it again because it hasn't seemed to have sunk in, but you can't goto the middle of one function from another, only internal to the function that has the label you're going to. And if you have to add extra variables to enable complex breaking methodologies, then you're making the code harder to read and/or understand, whichever definition you wish to use. Are we really still arguing over the use of a keyword that merely goes by another name in other languages even though it functions exactly the same? At this point, I can't help but feel that you're confusing semantics with keywords and don't understand why that's an incorrect conflation.
1
@ChapmanWorldOnTube So you are confusing semantics then. Okay, got it. Yeah, you'll never understand my point of view because of your dogmatic view of this subject. That's okay, not every developer is capable of understanding how the programs and programming language they use actually work nor can they understand how the high level abstractions both hurt and aid program design nor what they actually equate to. I do wonder if Dijkstra would've changed his tune had he lived to see some of the more horrific higher level abstractions that have been designed over the past 20 years and how absolutely awful software has gotten as a result of programmers understanding less of how things work.
1
Except that you can't jump out of a function with a goto.
1
Or, funny thought this, you could plan the code better and not have to refactor in hugely disruptive ways like that. Also, since a goto can't jump between functions, yeah, it'll still work if you copy the entire section of relevant code.
1
@BalintCsala The hugely destructive descriptor is when you break something by copying and pasting code to move it around. No one ever does that correctly and it always leads to breakages. I suppose if you're a bad programmer then a team manager like me would be annoying, but no one I've worked with thought so. Benefit of being able to pick your team, you can pick only the good programmers.
1