From: Mike Nelson <miken700@...>
Date: 2006-05-20T01:15:21+09:00
Subject: Re: How to "go to" in a RUBY script . . .

Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> I think the great fear of having spaghetti code resulted in a bit of
> an over-reaction:  the universal condemnation of goto. Goto is still
> sometimes simple and useful.
> 

I couldn't agree more.

I'd also add that not using goto structures doesn't help you from 
writing spaghetti code that much. Even using well-structured functions 
can become a complex mess.

The whole goto issue is sort of similar to the TDD problem in my mind. 
The difference is there is a possible fix for the TDD problem in BDD. 
It's not a code problem but a problem of how the we perceive the code. 
We used Test Driven Design to help our development processes but we 
missed the point of TDD so much that we have to come up with Behavior 
Driven Design, which is the really same thing but is more explicit in 
the terminology to help us get the point of what TDD was in the first 
place.

Back then, with the goto problem, we found that we were writing a bunch 
of messy and goto was the central construct that abused. So we decided 
that it was better to use the function construct in most cases in order 
to help this problem. But in our retreat of messy code we seemed to 
place our fear of it wholly into the goto construct itself. My guess is 
that this allows us to say that we can ignore a lot of that fear now as 
long as we don't use goto statements, which is sort of ignoring the 
central problem of messy code.

Because of all this, it now seems that we are left with a weird 
superstition around the goto construct. Which is pretty odd to me 
because it's still a fundamental construct used on the CPU, so why not 
use it in the code when it helps?

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