Computers for children

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Fri Jan 15 10:00:07 1999

At 11:37 PM 1/14/99 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
>
>Remember, C has a goto statement, although I don't think in my nearly 10
>years of C programming I've ever used it, although on certain rare
>occasions it seemed the easy way out to a sticky coding problem.
> [...] but C really suffers from a lack of
>a general error trapping mechanism that one can invoke to break out of
>loops as required. Sometimes I think goto's are the answer but I can
>never find an appropriate way to implement it.

I use "goto" in C on a regular and consistent basis for error exceptions:

USHORT firstFunction( void )
{
USHORT lerr;

    if ((lerr=secondFunction()) != TE_NOERROR) {
        goto out;
    }

out:
    return lerr;
}

The benefit is that all functions propogate an error code, any
function can fail, and all functions clean up after themselves
after their "out" label.

- John
Received on Fri Jan 15 1999 - 10:00:07 GMT