Forum :: Programming :: goto c++

I've heard many bad remarks on the goto statement.. I was just wondering if anyone on here feels like it is useless or would rather use a different statement in its place if they could?

I like it myself for its flexibility and ability to jump out of loops back or forward to a designated point!

I'm ok with it, but never really found a use for it that I couldn't do in other ways. You have to be careful with goto depending on what you use it for.

It's handy to use and good for jumping back and forth like you said^^

How did I miss this topic. I passionately hate goto in high level languages. The entire point of goto is to do a jump, which is an assembly instruction, which if you want to do the compiler's job for it, why not write in assembly? Or your own compiler!

I'm also a Djikstra fanboy though, and he wrote a paper back in the sixties on why goto is a bad idea. I tend to agree with him on a lot of things and he's my hero for coming up with shortest-path-first.

I think there is good use for it in C as an error trap mechanism, it makes code very readable in that way:

if(statement1)

goto error1;

else if(statement2)

goto error2;

error1: /* handle error 1 accordingly */

error2: /* handle error 2 accordingly */

I also see it in a lot of production code, and a lot of non-academics are like "yeah whatever it's fine". HOWEVER - in spite of both these things I think that using goto is a sign that your code needs to be written better. Overuse can lead to very hard-to-follow code.

On a totally and completely separate note, I also strongly dislike the 'var' keyword in strongly-typed languages (looking at you, C# >.<), unless you're using it with the keyword 'new', ie var list = new List<StupidlyLongTemplateClassNameIDontWantToTypeOutTwice>(). Otherwise it makes code stupidly unreadable because you have no idea what types things are.

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class EOSERV {
Programmer | Oldbie
Open source EO Client: https://github.com/ethanmoffat/EndlessClient
};