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Goto PHP 5.3
Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 07 August 2009 13:39
When I started programming I had to manually encode the processor instructions on my Zilog Z80 microprocessor. In the years to follow new procedural languages came available and I have coded a lot using those languages. Early 90's I learned about object orientation and and design patterns during the various courses I followed. From the start I was educated that using a goto statement was bad practice. One of the first writings about how bad goto statements are was done by Edsger W. Dijkstra in the Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. A goto statement easily creates dead code, and most of all it is very difficult to follow the program flow when goto statements are used, I agree fully with the statement that goto statements are bad practise.
Almost 30 years later we use modern programming languages like C, Java, Ruby and PHP. I never have had the need to use a goto statement in any of my programs, and the lack of the availability of this statement in PHP was even never noticed by me, until I was notified that the goto statement has been added to PHP 5.3...how bizar?
A hilarious bug report can be found in the PHP tracker, an even subtile and funny reply can be found in the PHP documentation page where the goto statement is explained, the image below taken from xkcd says it all ;-)
About the author Wilco Jansen
Wilco was born in 1967 in the Netherlands where he still lives. After years of being a programmer Wilco has worked as project manager and IT manager. Discovered Joomla! when he was creating his own content management system, and never lost focus after then. Joined core team as development coordinator in May 2006 just helping to make Joomla! even better then it is already. Wilco has been deeply involved in the Joomla project as Google summer of code program manager 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions, co-organizer of the Google Highly Participation contest in 2008, first ever development coordinator, creator of the Joomla bug squad, member of the board of Open source matters, regular speaker on world wide conference advocating Joomla and much, much more. Wilco has a bachelor degree in business and information engineering and studied Master of Science knowledge and information engineering at the Middlesex University in London.
More about Wilco JansenThere are 5 comments posted.
Always good that we are being missed :-D
Past weeks, and also upcoming months our focus will be Abillo, in the mean while we will try to write some blogs...enough topics, to little time ;-)
And now we will wait for the ALTER statement.
This was a statement in earlier years, what could change the goto during the execution of the program.
(All in favor of programming in a tiny memory environment, but impossible to retrace when you are due to change the program's code)
By the way the link : "Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148." is wrong (http://jfoobar.org/%20 in front of the right link)
Link has been corrected.
The ALTER statement could be used in COBOL and I remember it would lead to resignation when you used it. PHP is a very different language compared to COBOL, and it provides all kinds of Mechanism to alter the logic, not sure the following would work:
$label = 'JumpHere';
goto $label;
This would mimic the ALTER statement...hope you don't mind I will not test it :-D
More foo or bar
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Re: Welcome back
# 1 - Posted by: Brian Teeman on 2009-08-07 14:14:47
Welcome back to the blogging world. I hope that this post means that you and the rest of the jfoobar bloggers will be posting again on a daily basis. Kind of feel lost without something good to read with my morning coffee. I've tried to take up some of the slack ;)