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There are dozens of valid reasons to hate PHP. I don't know why everyone keeps picking on GOTO though. There are situations where it is the clearest and most c
by smanek 17y ago
There are dozens of valid reasons to hate PHP. I don't know why everyone keeps picking on GOTO though.
There are situations where it is the clearest and most concise way to express what you want (in modern times we emulate this functionality with continuations, exceptions, etc. because of the stigma attached to to GOTO). See http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pd... for a few examples.
Lots of perfectly respectable languages (Scheme, Lisp, C-Sharp, etc) have GOTOs in some form or another. Yes, you can abuse them, just like you can abuse functions, methods, objects, or anything else.
- Oompa 17y agoI'm not hating, I think it'll help clean up my PHP code. Just like you said, there's nothing wrong with GOTOs unless they're abused, just like any other language feature.
- aceofspades19 17y agoHow would gotos clean up your code?
- pmjordan 17y agoThey can be extremely useful in error handling. They're also great as a substitute for labeled break statements if your language doesn't support them.
- aceofspades19 17y agoWhat ever happened to exceptions, which were explicitly invented to handle errors
- pmjordan 17y agoYeah. Turns out they're no silver bullet either. These days, my approach is pragmatic: use whatever works and produces the most readable code.