Re: Re: Labeled Breaks (not the G-word)

At 18:06 27/11/2005, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:

Zeev Suraski wrote: 1. A forward-jumping construct only, to avoid giving users too much ammo to shoot themselves in the foot with spaghetti coding. One of the major uses of "jump" is the ability to "retry on error" by jumping backwards inside the code. Given that the limit of the functionality is completely superficial, there are no engine reasons for it, I'd much prefer we did not impose it.

Ilia, A general note - I think we're way beyond the days where the ability to implement something plays a major role in our decision making process. Between all of us, we have enough smart people and fairly good infrastructure to make pretty much everything that's conceivable possible. That doesn't mean, at all, that we should start going around implementing everything. Given that, I don't see the fact that this limitation is artificially imposed, implementation-wise, to have any significance at all, either way. The discussion should be on whether we should allow this functionality or not. Retry-on-error appears to me, at least upon first sight, as an excellent example of where goto should not be used. That's why we have functions and loops. And that's just one example of why we shouldn't give the users the weapons to shoot themselves in the foot. Because they most certainly *will* :) Zeev