3 ms·

Back in the day, I was an RPG programmer (on an AS/400), and I had a co-worker who insisted upon using geographical labels for all of his GOTO targets: GOTO BAR

Back in the day, I was an RPG programmer (on an AS/400), and I had a co-worker who insisted upon using geographical labels for all of his GOTO targets: GOTO BARCELONA, GOTO TOKYO, etc. Needless to say, maintaining his code took some getting used to.

Stormbringer 16y ago
That sounds kind of funny. Where do you go on error? One time I had to debug this incredibly obfuscated Word Basic subroutine. It was such a mess of gotos (deliberately so) that the company that wrote it for us thought they had us over a barrel and could charge us like a wounded bull. That is, until I showed my cow-orkers the superior technology of "paper, scissors and sticky tape".
- Luyt 16y ago
  ON ERROR GOTO REDMOND
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Redmond wasn't even on our mental map in those days; Windows was still at 3.11, and NT hadn't been released. The only thing we used PCs were good for was to hold our 5250-emulation cards...
- Someone 16y ago
  Where do you go on error Hell, Arizona or any other village with that name. Real C# code can be like this: if(John is evil){ goto Hell}; (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/scekt9xw%28v=vs.71%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/scekt9xw%28v=vs.71%2...)
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    GOTO HELL showed up with predictable frequency. I don't recall if he used it for errors, though.
    - Gibbon 16y ago
      Which Hell would that be? The one in California, Michigan, the Cayman Islands or Norway?
me2i81 16y ago
The thing about languages that require GOTOs is that there is often no inherent meaning in the label, such as in a control structure that we'd take for granted these days, and back in the day you were often limited by token size (in one assembler I used it was 5 characters) so people sometimes used schemes like "A0001", "A0002", etc. or sometimes "DOG", "PIG", "CAT", etc. though the former was preferable as it wasn't distracting.

Stormbringer 16y ago

That sounds kind of funny. Where do you go on error? One time I had to debug this incredibly obfuscated Word Basic subroutine. It was such a mess of gotos (deliberately so) that the company that wrote it for us thought they had us over a barrel and could charge us like a wounded bull. That is, until I showed my cow-orkers the superior technology of "paper, scissors and sticky tape".

Luyt 16y ago
ON ERROR GOTO REDMOND
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Redmond wasn't even on our mental map in those days; Windows was still at 3.11, and NT hadn't been released. The only thing we used PCs were good for was to hold our 5250-emulation cards...
Someone 16y ago
Where do you go on error Hell, Arizona or any other village with that name. Real C# code can be like this: if(John is evil){ goto Hell}; (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/scekt9xw%28v=vs.71%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/scekt9xw%28v=vs.71%2...)
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  GOTO HELL showed up with predictable frequency. I don't recall if he used it for errors, though.
  - Gibbon 16y ago
    Which Hell would that be? The one in California, Michigan, the Cayman Islands or Norway?

me2i81 16y ago

The thing about languages that require GOTOs is that there is often no inherent meaning in the label, such as in a control structure that we'd take for granted these days, and back in the day you were often limited by token size (in one assembler I used it was 5 characters) so people sometimes used schemes like "A0001", "A0002", etc. or sometimes "DOG", "PIG", "CAT", etc. though the former was preferable as it wasn't distracting.