PHP introduces "goto"

http://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.goto.php

by zain • 17 years ago

59 87 17 years ago

noodle3• 17 years ago

ugh. they caved. too bad. this kind of hurts their movement towards OO. now we'll probably see see tons of people using goto as bandaid measures instead of learning better techniques to solve their problems. look out for raptors.

dryicerx• 17 years ago

It's PHP, it's already a band aid measure.

Adding goto just incremented the keyword count, nothing more. Bad coders will still keep on writing bad code, with or without the help of goto.

jcapote• 17 years ago

I wish I had more points to give this comment

huhtenberg3• 17 years ago

Oh, common. Are we talking about the language that allows run-time renaming of the variables ? I mean if you have that then adding a goto hardly qualifies as "too bad".

wvenable• 17 years ago

How exactly do you rename a variable?

pbiggar3• 17 years ago

I think we aren't. I have no idea what language you're thinking of.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

FWIW, Perl has had goto forever, and I have never encountered it in real code. It just isn't necessary.

So I doubt this will make PHP any worse than it already is. They should really consider adding some useful features, though.

phaylon• 17 years ago

And even if it's seen in Perl land, in most cases it is called with a code reference as argument, not a label, which simply replaces the current item on the calling stack with the code reference. This allows for manual tail-call-optimisation which is quite nice sometimes.

jnorthrop• 17 years ago

This feels like a giant step towards the past.

ComputerGuru2• 17 years ago

This is a giant step towards the past.

Welcome to 1980.

encoderer4• 17 years ago

while() loops are just goto's with some syntactic sugar..

antidaily• 17 years ago

    10 PRINT "WELCOME TO 1980"
    
    20 GOTO 10

kaiuhl• 17 years ago

Using PHP is a giant step towards the past.

PHP will never fully be utilized as an OO language by the vast majority of its user base due to its syntactically terrible standard library and history as a functional language.

As such, this addition makes plenty of sense.

youngian• 17 years ago

Functional language? Did you mean to say procedural language?

I can assure you that PHP is not a functional language (despite all my efforts to make it one).

noodle3• 17 years ago

1) its only a step backwards if you're currently using a better language. its a step forward for other people who are way behind, or for people who have no web development experience and want to get started. it a decent and very popular learning language. if someone starts writing about goto in their php tutorials for beginners, we'll have a problem.

2) php is procedural, not functional. (edit: whoops, beaten to this punch)

ars11• 17 years ago

PHP will never fully be utilized as an OO language because it's a stupid idea to write web pages with an OO language.

Web pages are just not suited to OO. Encapsulation can be done via functions - adding OO to it gets you nothing except longer code.

Making things more complicated does not make them better.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

Haha, wow how sad. The kind of sadness created when realizing how disgustingly pathetic our evolution can often be.

I can't wait to spend minutes of my life when I have to go through another programmer's PHP code who uses gotos.

encoderer4• 17 years ago

I think you left out your goto CalmDownFirst line in your DramaQueenPreventor class.

jdp• 17 years ago

Why is everyone jumping on this as a negative? Goto isn't inherently evil. Of course in most cases there is a construct that would be a better fit than goto, but it does have its uses. As far as readability goes, odds are a programmer isn't going to be jumping to a label 300 lines up, its used mostly to break out of nested loops and to simulate stuff like state machines. Check out http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html

pygy• 17 years ago

They already have a break statement to get out of loops of arbitrary depth. http://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.break.php

And why, except perhaps for the hack value, would you simulate a state machine in PHP?

GOTOs are good when used wisely in certain contexts. I don't see where they could be of any use in the PHP niche (but I'd be glad to hear about such examples). Seasoned PHP coders don't need it.

Besides, PHP is mostly a beginner's programming language, who learn by example using code found online. They will be exposed to even worse practices from day one.

wooby• 17 years ago

It's not negative in that, people can program using whatever language they want using whatever language constructs they want.

But for PHP, which is mostly for web development, I would think using exceptions is a much peer-friendlier way of handling what you'd probably be using goto for in a web app.

If you're writing state machines or parsers, PHP probably isn't the way to go anyway. But hey - whatever floats your boat.

Scriptor• 17 years ago

It takes a great deal of discipline to not use goto for quick fixes when you feel lazy. Unfortunately, many PHP programmers simply don't have the experience to properly structure code, since PHP is their first actual experience with programming. While major projects like frameworks and well-established CMS's will likely do fine, smaller-scale projects and codebases will suffer.

raffi• 17 years ago

I've thought of adding goto to Sleep. Have you ever looked at the code in the Linux kernel? It's full of gotos. They use goto's to make sure functions have one exit point and to cleanly deal with errors in one spot.

paulgb2• 17 years ago

Kernel hackers know presumably what they're doing and use goto only when they have a good reason. Can the same be said of PHP programmers?

I'm all for the "don't protect programmers from themselves" philosophy, until I'm the guy who has to use or maintain the code.

ars11• 17 years ago

Not having goto's is not going to help you in the slightest from bad programmers.

look_lookatme• 17 years ago

From the page:

"It is not allowed to jump into a loop or switch statement. A fatal error is issued in such cases."

At least that isn't possible. What a mess it would be if this wasn't the case.

abyssknight2• 17 years ago

I feel like I've been trolled by the PHP haters again.

All of this language-ism is killing my chi.

invisible• 17 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly. C++ has goto, and although it's clear C++ can't learn from the past, at least programmers for PHP can be warned to use goto conservatively.

Error handling and portability of code from other languages will make PHP more widely used. That is the goal of the founders/contributors: make PHP used as widely as possible on it's features alone.

abyssknight2• 17 years ago

I feel this is a relevant cross post, at least for my own amusement:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650328

robotron• 17 years ago

This isn't some kind of surprise. It has been discussed for some time now.

There is also no reason for a developer to use it if it's not wanted.

ars11• 17 years ago

Yay! Finally I've been waiting for this for a long time.

I can finally get rid of some spaghetti code: goto emulation via while loops.

Yes, it's not often you need goto, but sometimes you do.

pbiggar3• 17 years ago

No way! I do exactly this. Switch statement, while loop, and lots of continue statements.

Its a lowering of basic blocks that I want to print out to test.

What's yours?

sev• 17 years ago

I understand why C and C++ have goto statements (as well as other older languages). But to actually "introduce" goto's in a language that didn't have it or need it, making it even possible to write such horrible code is, in my opinion, pointless and worthless. It promotes illegible and bad code in general.

tamersalama2• 17 years ago

Anyone knows where's the PHP core team blog/site (if there's such team)?

tamersalama2• 17 years ago

Someone pointed out the minutes-of-meeting http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html#adding-goto

sil3ntmac• 17 years ago

Sweet! Hope they implement COMEFROM next.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Most langauges have that. It's called "catch".

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

It's a bit late for that. http://cadie.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

e4m• 17 years ago

I once used that a lot on my C64. Made sense back in 1982 and in limited cases, makes sense today.

dflock• 17 years ago

The first user contributed note on that page:

  <?php
    wtf:
    echo 'For real!?';
    echo 'Srsly!?';
    goto wtf;
  ?>

Heh.

nir2• 17 years ago

So what? If you think goto is harmful, don't use it. If you think PHP in general is harmful, don't use that either. Maybe help build something comparable to Wordpress or Drupal in your favorite language so other people can use it instead of PHP. If all you have to offer is empty sarcasm, goto Reddit.

tetha• 17 years ago

And then you have to maintain spaghetti code in PHP with gotos.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

Finally! Now PHP really is the web's assembly language.

antirez• 17 years ago

Goto is a good idea in C, not only for the obvious low-levelness reasons, but also because if you can write C you are almost certainly a bit wiser than the average PHP programmer that may use goto for things I prefer don't think about before to go to sleep :)

uriel• 17 years ago

"If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there" -- Ken Thompson

ahlatimer• 17 years ago

I was working for a company doing mostly COBOL programming about a year ago, and I can honestly say that GOTO can be used neatly and effectively, but it can also turn code into a horrible mess. For COBOL, it's an absolute must. There are no while or for loops in COBOL (at least not in the version we were using), so you had to replicate that with GOTO's and paragraphs. For PHP, I really don't see this as necessary.

So long as it's not widely publicized in tutorials and the like, I don't really see a whole lot of novice coders getting their hands on this. I'm not particularly concerned about experienced programmers using GOTO in PHP, especially if they've used in another language where it is more necessary.

patryn20• 17 years ago

So....all the progress PHP has made in recent years has not been undone.....but has been rendered irrelevant. Never again will anyone be taken seriously while using PHP. It will once again be purely the domain of amateurs and script kiddies.

This is being said as someone who has created marvelous applications in PHP and has dealt with all the PHP language shortcomings up to this point. Makes me truly, truly sad.

drawkbox• 17 years ago

This helps quite a bit... It helps people move on from PHP because it is the 'language that later added goto'. A sad day for programmers in PHP.

gotos are a bad programmer's recursive method. Even people that use while loops like pepper scare me a bit. I have seen many'a'app get stuck in memory draining death loops with goto and even while(). Flags are dead, long live events and messages.

PHP introduces "goto"

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