Re: Programming skills required by mathematicians?

Herman Rubin wrote:

> In article
<b716b85c-ddfb-4bc5-b90a-5ac81624fd41@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Marshall  <marshall.spight@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>>On Jul 1, 7:40 am, hru...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Herman Rubin) wrote:
>>
>>>As for gotos, I find them easy to use,
>>>and spaghetti code is best for spaghetti algorithms.
> 
>>Sure, gotos are easy to write, but what's usually im****tant
>>for code is that it be easy to read and easy to maintain,
>>and gotos are anathema to that.
> 
> Hah!  They are much easier to read than following indentations.
> Several levels of indentations especially.

Yes ! Sometimes even running off 80 columns IBM punch cards ! Especially
with those TAB (8 characters) wide indentations. Many, if not all, Java
programmers suffer from this indentation syndrome. It seens to be a part
of their little culture. Such deep indentations can be prevented easily,
though, with proper modularization. And 2 characters wide indentations
offer much better readability - they are pretty standard in my culture,
which is Delphi Pascal. Don't think that gotos are a better way out ..

> Assembler language and the machine use gotos.  The user
> cannot do things efficiently without telling the machine
> what to do.
> 
> One instruction I find missing on the "modern" machines I
> have seen is a conditional skip of a few instructions; I
> have never seen more than one.  This would enable no loss
> of pipelining.  The compiler could count how many instructions
> in a large number of cases from code.

How about:  if <OK> then <do if OK true> else <do if OK false> end;
Then the <do if OK false> instructions are skipped if OK is true, that
_is_ conditionally, not ? Another (loop) construct in (Delphi) Pascal:

     while true do
     begin
       <anything>
       OK := <condition>;
       if OK then Continue;
       <things if not OK>
     end;

So what's your problem ? Loss of pipelining ?

Han de Bruijn