[Info-vax] BASIC (and Horizon)

[Dan Cross]

In article <upejl0$1nkl5$1 at dont-email.me>,
Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>I've seen code that did all kinds of confusing things, just avoid a GoTo branch. 
>  My question is, why?  If the need is a simple and rather easy to understand 
>branch, why get complex,

`goto` by itself is a sharp tool; sometimes incredibly useful,
but dangerous if misused.  Our industry is littered with example
after example of `goto` misused.  For instance,
https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html

Because of the potential and history of misuse, it's a laudable
goal to reduce use of `goto`, and indeed, over the years we've
seen generations of languages where the primary use cases have
been analyzed and the most useful lifted into new constructs
that become first-class parts of their respective languages;
`break` and `continue` for loops, exceptions, and so on.

Moreover, this is useful in the sense that programming languages
also serve a communicative purpose.  How many of us would change
a `for` loop to if's and gotos given the choice?  I wager few
would; the former communicates intent far more clearly than the
latter.  For that matter, if we could iterate over a collection,
that's even better again.

That said, `goto` obviously _does_ have a place when used
judiciously.  As Ken Thompson once said, "if you want to go
somewhere, goto is the best way to get there."  Like all goals,
the desire to reduce `goto` prevelence is mostly aspirational.
Certainly, we're well past the context of Djikstra's  "GO TO
STATEMENT CONSIDERED HARMFUL" CACM letter.

	- Dan C.