[Israel.pm] Some thoughts about the "Red Flags" Presentation

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

I've been thinking of two things that Sawyer said in his Red Flags 
presentation:

1. http://www.slideshare.net/xSawyer/red-flags-1683319

2. http://use.perl.org/~xsawyerx/journal/39230

3. http://use.perl.org/~xsawyerx/journal/38576

The first thing I've thought about was Sawyer's warning against using goto 
statements. One needs to know a little history (including some less known) 
when considering the old "Goto statement considered harmful" mantra. I've 
provided a summary of it here:

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware3/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=78092

Granted, Dijkstra wrote an article with this title, and many people agreed 
with him, and it was the opening shot of the Structured Programming Wars. 
However, the title was mutated to be memorable by his editor (based on older 
"considered harmful" editorials), and Dijkstra never meant that GOTOs were 
always harmful. 

Moreover, some people have demonstrated that it is possible to do structured 
programming with goto statements, and sometimes even better with them than 
without them.

For example, Don Knuth wrote an article "Structured Programming Using Goto 
Statements" (rumouredly sub-titled "'Goto Statement Considered Harmful' 
Considered Harmful") in which he deomnstrated exactly that. And I take this 
view as well.

In Perl I found little motivation to use goto so far, and usually did not have 
the need to in production code. But in non-C++ C (did not do a lot of C++ or 
ObjC) I found it to be a useful tool especially for the cleanup-on-failure 
pattern or to emulate Perl's "last LABEL" or "next LABEL".

{
 .
 .
 .
ptr1 = malloc(...);

if (! ptr1)
{
    goto cleanup; 
}

ptr2 = malloc(....);

if (! ptr2)
{
    goto cleanup;
}
/* More stuff. */
 .
 .
 .
cleanup:

if (ptr2)
{
	free(ptr2);
	ptr2 = NULL;
}

if (ptr1)
{
	free(ptr1);
	ptr1 = NULL;
}

}

Sawyer later gave the argument that using goto was equivalent to using a jump 
in a conversation. However, when talking we use different conventions from 
when writing code, and we could say "do as I told you earlier" or "go to step 
6" in conversation or writing. And what are the conversation equivalents of 
loops, subroutines, closures, coroutines/continuations, object inheritance, 
etc. and other thing we use in code? So it's not a right analogy.

Sawyer also gave a similar argument for criticising this construct which I 
tend to like:

<<<<
if (...) 
{ 
	# do nothing 
}
else
{
 .
 .
 .
}
>>>>

(I'm flattered he read my code.)

He claimed that putting an empty block was equivalent to a pause when saying 
"If the door is locked [pause]". However, it is equivalent to "If the door is 
locked do nothing - you're set", because we as humans don't interpret empty 
blocks, but can understand a "do nothing" imperative.

Recently I've ran into the following code:

<<<<

my $var = ...;

while ($line = ....)
{
	if (($var) = ($line =~ m{(...)}....
	{
		# Do nothing
	}
	else
	{
		die "Could not match var in line '$line'."
	}
}
>>>>

And I prefered to keep it this way because I was not sure of the !~ 
implications. (Though now that I think of it, I could have used if (!(($var) = 
 ...).

This is what I had to say.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
"Star Trek: We, the Living Dead" - http://shlom.in/st-wtld

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