On man, 2003-01-13 at 12:09, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:
>
> > On 12 Jan 2003, Robert Love wrote:
> > > On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 15:22, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > >
> > > > No, you've been brainwashed by CS people who thought that Niklaus
> > > > Wirth actually knew what he was talking about. He didn't. He
> > > > doesn't have a frigging clue.
> > >
> > > I thought Edsger Dijkstra coined the "gotos are evil" bit in his
> > > structured programming push?
> >
>
> Actually Edsger Dijkstra wrote a paper entitled "Goto considered Harmful"
> He never called them evil. And the title was more for shock value to
> grab peoples attention. For the beginners Dijkstra did not
> distinguish between goto, break, return, and continue.
>
> You can find many of his papers at:
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/
>
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
to be exact. Reading it you can tell exactly how much of an
mathematician Dijkstra really was. At these times It's best to keep in
mind a quote:
"I used to understand the Theory of Relativity, but then the
mathematicians got hold of it."
-- Albert Einstein
> What he was after was simple and maintainable code, and from
> everything I have read, I think he would have no major problems with
> the Linux kernel code.
>
Well, in the formentioned paper he made the case that while - do, and
do-while are superfluous; we should all use recursion instead.
Out of respect of the dead, I'm not going to say what I think of that.
Since C don't allow goto beyond it's function, most of what was
problematic of goto's aren't legal anyway.
But I submit that those that think goto's are evil never had to deal
with smp locks.
Most goto's I've seen deal with error handling, and I guess much could
be "solved/hidden" with a "on_return { };" clause, but...
An on_return would be a simplified try/trow/catch that is limited to the
function.
IMHO: a trow that is catch'ed somewhere up the call stack, is just as
much an evil as goto.
> > So
> > these days I can only rant about Niklaus Wirth, who took the "structured
> > programming" thing and enforced it in his languages (Pascal and Modula-2),
> > and thus forced his evil on untold generations of poor CS students who had
> > to learn langauges that weren't actually useful for real work.
>
> Now that is something worth criticizing!
>
Considering that students are bottled on Java these day, they're still
learning a language unusable for real work.
> >
> > (Yeah, yeah, most _practical_ versions of Pascal ended up having all the
> > stuff necessary to break structure, but as you may be able to tell, I was
> > one of the unwashed masses who had to write in "standard Pascal" in my
> > youth. I'm scarred for life).
>
>
> Well you seem to be coping well. Just a little Pascal phobia there...
>
> Eric
>
>
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-- _________________________________________________________________________Terje Eggestad mailto:terje.eggestad@scali.no Scali Scalable Linux Systems http://www.scali.com
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