Re: [PLUG] 'goto' in C code

[Jason Lenthe <lenthe@yahoo.com>]

I once had the misfortune of having to customize a
program with more than 200 gotos in.  I discovered
that it is really easy to break code that is not your
own and has a lot of gotos in it.

Some people have pointed out that gotos can make code
more efficient.  While this may be true in some cases,
in other cases gotos could also inhibit the optimizing
complier from doing things like unrolling loops and
such, thereby making the code less efficient than it
might be.

One other interesting thing is that break and continue
are really just specific kinds of gotos, and so
anything that applies to goto should probably apply to
break and continue as well.

My philosophy is that you should focus on making your
algorithm as efficient as possible, then write smart
code that is easy to maintain, and let the optimizer
worry about reducing the number of machine intructions
executed.

Jason

--- "Daniel K. Spicer" <spicer@linuxmania.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have a reason why goto should not be
> used in C code ??
> 
> I like to use it for error handling, but a couple
> managers where I work
> have this idea that the goto keyword should never be
> used, although they
> can't offer any reason why. I have heard before that
> it's not good
> practice, but I've never heard a valid reason why.
> Can anyone shed some
> light ?
> 
>
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