| ▲ | jcranmer 4 hours ago | |
Yes, break, continue, and return are all "just" gotos in disguise. But they restrict the power of the goto enough to not cause the problems that goto causes while providing a good deal of semantic power to users. Namely, all of these are essentially variations on early return (you can also throw in the logical && and || operators here, albeit they are slightly different in having two exit points rather than one--they're a fusion of if and break, essentially). And it sort of turns that there are a lot of cases where "return when any of these conditions, tested in a particular order, holds" turns out to be the most natural way to express an algorithm, and these goto-like constructs are the most natural way to write them. (FWIW, this is essentially the argument that Knuth makes in his defense of goto paper) | ||
| ▲ | augustk 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
The argument in the article was that the for loop is (potentially) "lying" and that is still true in my example. Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 had a LOOP statement in which an EXIT statement could occur anywhere. That statement was at least not misleading. In Wirth's last revision of his last programming language Oberon the loop statement is removed and return is no longer a statement but a clause at the end of a function procedure. This makes Oberon a purely structured language. | ||