use Perl

• Worse is better, obviously (Score:2)

  by nicholas (3034)

  Sadly goto is a useful construction in C, because the flow control primitives are, well, far more primitive than Perl. For example, you can only break out of the innermost loop.

  Perl's goto has something that isn't offered by C or PHP - goto &NAME [perl.org]. That form is really the only form that anyone should be using in Perl code, and then only when they know what they're doing and why. I don't know PHP, but either it has flow control structures as powerful as Perl's, in which case goto is not needed, or the f
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by xsawyerx (8978)

    Thanks for providing more accurate (or.. much more accurate) finds

    I also liked the explanation you gave on the use of gotos. I had a discussion about that with a colleague (who is a Python programmer) and we got around to labels and I tried to explain that Perl has label-aware loop commands. That you can last to a label. In PHP, you can continue an amount of loops outside (continue 3 would exit 3 loops above) while apparently in Python you can't do either, only break and loop.

    I guess what I'm saying is that
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by xsawyerx (8978)

      Oh, and I have no idea what the other files are. Maybe files that should be cleaned?
  • A quick plug for ack (Score:2)

    by petdance (2468)

    For those who don't use ack, this is exactly the sort of thing ack was designed to do easily.

    find perl-5.10.0 -name ext -prune -o '(' -type f -iname '*.c' -or -iname '*.cpp' -or -iname '*.h' ')' -exec cat {} \; | egrep '\bgoto\b' | wc -l

    is just

    ack --cc --cpp -w goto perl-5.10.0 | wc -l

    --cc means "C source and headers only", --cpp is "C++ source and headers only", -w means "word only".

    Just install CPAN package App::Ack.

    --
    

    --
    xoa
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by xsawyerx (8978)

      *beats head on wall*

      Thanks Andy :)
• stats - one third of perl C goto is toke (Score:1)

  by n1vux (1492)

  in the 5.8.9-rc1 that i had handy from a regression test

  of 1270 C-ish file hits using Andy's ack invocation

  nearly one third are in one file alone
    403 toke.c

  most of which and one quarter of the total being exactly
    343 toke.c: goto unknown;

  the long tail continues over 65 files, but a mere 5 files cover 50% in 5 a tie
    403 toke.c
      95 regexec.c
      54 pp_sys.c
      53 sv.c
      39 opmini.c
      39 op.c # tied for 5th
  (subtotal 683 53%)

  --
  Bill
  # I had a sig when sigs were cool
  use Sig;
  • Oh my god, the statistics (Score:1)

    by xsawyerx (8978)

    Very nice, thanks for sharing. :)