jean-michel wrote:
Hi all, I saw a lot of comments saying GOTO is not usefull, very bad, and we should'nt use it because we don't need it. I think that's true, but only if you *create* programs. But if the goal is to provide some kind of converter to automatically take an old application written with an old language (using GOTO), and generating python code, it would certainly a great help to have this (unclean) feature in native python.
But an automatic translator is certain to be imperfect. One can no more translate mechanically between computer languages than one can translate mechanically between human languages -- and we've all seen the fun that can be had by machine-translating from language A -> language B -> language A, right? What do you think the effect of that sort of meaning-drift would be on application code?
In other words, any translation from one language to another will require significant human attention, by someone familiar with both languages, to ensure that the original meaning is preserved as close as possible. You're going to have to rewrite chunks of code by hand no matter what you do; it'd be silly to *not* take that opportunity to purge things like GOTO.
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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