Re: any chance of 2.6.0-test*?

Rik van Riel
2003-01-12T21:21:14Z

On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Rob Wilkens wrote:

> However, I have always been taught, and have always believed that
> "goto"s are inherently evil. They are the creators of spaghetti code

If the main flow of the code is through a bunch of hard to trace
gotos and you choose to blame the tool instead of the programmer,
I guess you could blame goto.

However, the goto can also be a great tool to make the code more
readable. The goto statement is, IMHO, one of the more elegant
ways to code exceptions into a C function; that is, dealing with
error situations that don't happen very often, in such a way that
the error handling code doesn't clutter up the main code path.

As an example, you could look at fs/super.c::do_kern_mount()

mnt = alloc_vfsmnt(name);
if (!mnt)
goto out;
sb = type->get_sb(type, flags, name, data);
if (IS_ERR(sb))
goto out_mnt;

Do you see how the absence of the error handling cleanup code
makes the normal code path easier to read ?

regards,

Rik
--
Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH".
http://www.surriel.com/ http://guru.conectiva.com/
Current spamtrap: october@surriel.com