Perspective on Unusual Control Structures

At one time or another, someone thought that each of the following control structures was a good idea:

  • Unrestricted use of gotos

  • Ability to compute a goto target dynamically and jump to the computed location

  • Ability to use goto to jump from the middle of one routine into the middle of another routine

  • Ability to call a routine with a line number or label that allowed execution to begin somewhere in the middle of the routine

  • Ability to have the program generate code on the fly and then execute the code it just wrote

At one time, each of these ideas was regarded as acceptable or even desirable, even though now they all look hopelessly quaint, outdated, or dangerous. The field of software development has advanced ...

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