Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Subject | Re: any chance of 2.6.0-test*? | From | Terje Eggestad <> | Date | 13 Jan 2003 15:34:00 +0100 |
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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 > > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
-- _________________________________________________________________________
Terje Eggestad mailto:terje.eggestad@scali.no Scali Scalable Linux Systems http://www.scali.com
Olaf Helsets Vei 6 tel: +47 22 62 89 61 (OFFICE) P.O.Box 150, Oppsal +47 975 31 574 (MOBILE) N-0619 Oslo fax: +47 22 62 89 51 NORWAY _________________________________________________________________________
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