[Coco] GOTO and code maintainability

[Steven Hirsch]

On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Aaron Banerjee wrote:

> All of us have at least at one point in time either used, or tried to figure 
> out code containing GOTO statements.  In a recent programming environment I 
> was in, GOTO (or it's equivalent in whatever language we happened to be 
> programming) was expressly forbidden -- no exceptions no matter what.
>
> Just to be an irritant, I chucked a single GOTO (to make a polling loop) in a 
> relatively simple program, which totally confused my colleagues.
>
> Given that it isn't abused, I don't see why GOTO makes code any less 
> maintainable than other obviscation techniques, such as polymorphism (which, 
> while useful, if abused can lead to very multiple inheritance or 
> exception-based program control.  At least GOTO tells you where it is 
> going....
>
> Has anyone else run into this type of "GOTO intolerance" while programming?

Writing a classic state-machine is quite difficult without goto's.  Like 
everything else in the this world, "it depends".



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