D vs C++

foobar foo at bar.com
Sun Dec 26 00:35:16 PST 2010


Don Wrote:

> bearophile wrote:
> > Walter Bright:
> > 
> >> I thought the idea that break and continue were bad died about 25 years ago. 
> >> Pascal didn't allow them, and pretty much everyone hated the workaround of 
> >> having to use flag variables.
> > 
> > You need to add some shades of grey to your palette. break, continue and goto are bad, 
> 
> Why are break and continue bad? I haven't heard anyone make that claim 
> for a very long time.
> BTW everyone I've known who thought they were evil, also wanted to ban 
> multiple return statements in a single function. Most of them didn't 
> like case statements, either.

Isn't this subjective and depends on what you compare with and also depends on use cases? 
Structured programming is considered a huge improvement over gotos and spaghetti code and I thought that OO is considered better than Structured programming. Isn't using polymorphism considered usually better than explicitly maintaining a switch statement? 

Of course, all of that depends on your use case and on the programmer. For instance a compiler writer may make better use of gotos compared to structured programming while an average programmer should stick with structured programming to avoid bugs. 

My personal opinion is that D should not limit programming styles and should allow got/break/continue/etc. 
Of course that doesn't mean that the official D style guide should recommend writing long functions with lots of control statements. :)



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