On Mon, 2014-04-07 at 18:47 -0400, Larry Bradley wrote:
> Back in my mainframe IBM Fortran programming days (talk about an
> unstructured language), we used to discuss the merits of having a
> COMEFROM statement, not just a GOTO :)

Larry, you must be almost as old as me.

I remember the structured programming battles, and as a hardcore Fortran
programmer at the time, I remember how silly I thought the idea of
"goto-less" programming was.  I even recall the Datamation article where
they talked about the possibility of a computed COMEFROM.

In one of my first attempts at "goto-less" programming, I decided to do
an app in PL/1.  PL/1 was such a rich language that it was said that no
two programmers understood the same subset of the language.  I don't
think anyone but IBM ever produced a complete PL/1 compiler although
there were plenty of subsets.

Anyway, I had no concept of structured programming at the time, so I
basically used the PL/1 ON CONDITION to duplicate the effect of a goto.
This had much the same effect as a COMEFROM except perhaps a bit more
insidious since control would transfer just because some variable took
on a particular value.

Quite an opaque program it was.

--McD


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