[fpc-pascal] The reason why linus torvalds hate-pascal

[mm]

Vinzent Hoefler a écrit :
> On Thursday 17 April 2008 17:53, mm wrote:
>> Rodrigo Palhano a écrit :
>>> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:39:37 -0300, Zaher Dirkey <parmaja at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>>>> I use GO TO when teaching pascal, but after all i ask them to not
>>>> use it, it
>>>> just a bridge to learning the logic of programming language.
>>>>
>>>> There is another word i hate to use it it is EXIT.
>>> I also understand EXIT as a bad programming practice, it makes life
>>> harder for code readers.
>> I don't ;-) Even Ada has an "Exit" instruction which one is better
>> than the Pascal one because, with Ada, "Exit" is a keyword.
> 
> Careful. Ada's "exit" is not Pascal's "exit", it's much more like 
> Pascals "break" (and thus shares the same deficiences when it comes to 
> the possibility of obfuscated control structures, but can be even 
> worse).
> 
> What Pascal programmers know as "exit" is called "return" in Ada

Yes, of course :-) Now, I don't quite agree with you with what you call
obfuscated control structures. I find the Ada "Break" (which is called
"exit") very handy. In order to do the same with Pascal, not taking in
account some sub-optimal Standard Pascal fanatic method, one has to use
a goto.

For instance, the Ada code

   for i in imin .. imax loop
     J_LOOP:
     for j in jmin .. jmax loop
       for k in kmin .. kmax loop
         exit J_LOOP when <some test>;
         DoSomething;
       end loop;
     end loop J_LOOP;
   end loop;

is equivalent to

   for i := imin to imax do
   begin
     for j := jmin to jmax do
       for k := kmin to kmax do
       begin
         if <some test> then goto EndJLoop;
         DoSomething;
       end;
     EndJLoop:
   end;

but I prefer the Ada code.

mm
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