GOTO and/or BREAK LABEL View as Markdown

Please reviw and vote.

1. goto and break label
2. goto only (like C)
3. break label only (like Java)
4. nothing

1. +0.25
2. -1e38
3. +1e38
4. -infinity

Or, in other words, I want labelled break, and I don't want to have to emulate it with goto.

As a user who spent several days tracking down a subtle bug caused by a continue n that hadn't been altered to continue n+1, I regard labelled break as a vital addition -- for me, it's not the frequency with which it is used (very low, I agree), but the incredibly disproportionate maintenance burden (potentially extremely high). In my case, I was adding a level to a heavily nested looping/conditional structure (7 or 8 levels deep) extending over several hundred lines, and out of the few break/continue statements that needed adjusting I missed just one. If they had been labelled breaks, there would have been no maintenance problem, and I'd have had several more days on the next step.

If the "Java-like" syntax is seen as confusing, what about, as in some other languages, interpolating the label into the for/foreach/while statement:

for (....) label {...} or for label (...) {...}

This is clearly a different animal from a goto target label: (but should be in the same namespace, of course).

OK, I'll shut up now and slope off into a corner. (Perhaps I should design my own language whilst I'm there ... but nah, did that decades ago and got bored -- prefer higher-level programming these days!)

Cheers!

Mike

Mike Ford, Electronic Information Services Adviser,
Learning Support Services, Learning & Information Services,
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