goto statements can sometimes be useful to go down (to lower lines of code) in code, but can create a mess if used to go up (to higher lines of code). Therefore, I am wondering if there is any language that only allows goto statement to go down, e.g, godown.
Edit:
My main motivation for asking this question is this question Why does Go have a “goto” statement
I feel like if designers of a modern language like go decided to use goto statement there is a place for it. Also, as pointed out in one of the answers to the question, goto are used in go source code.
When I said “create a mess”, I was referring to something like this, in a more complicated scenario:
package main
import "fmt"
func main(){
i := 0
back:
i++
fmt.Println(i)
if i < 10 {
goto back
}
fmt.Println("we are finished")
}
8
Some languages allow labelled break. This is a break that allows out of the loop of any nesting, like this
outer:
for (var i = 0 ; i < M ; i++) {
for ( var j = 0 ; j < N ; j++) {
if (f[i, j]) {
break outer;
}
}
}
This can be seen as “goto only down and out”, which is a far more restricted version of “goto only down”.
3
I don’t know of any [programming] languages that do this; if it’s “bad” enough to allow goto at all then it will allow a goto to go anywhere.
I seem to recall a scripting language that only searched forward for the target of a goto statement but, sadly, I can’t remember which one; it may have been a [very] early version of DOS.
2
There are only few cases that I think an only-go-down goto statement might be useful, but all can be done more elegantly via break and switch statements.
There is no need for Goto-down statement, in my opinion, and I’m not aware of any mature or experimental programming language with such an ability.
0