In the Absence of a GoTo Statement: Newbie needs menu-launcher to choose amongst sub-programs

[Alex Martelli]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> wrote in message
news:9b814u$39p$1 at slb4.atl.mindspring.net...
> Alex-bot:
> > the answer is: "because, in a well-designed language, there
> >is no situation in which ``nothing else will do as well''":-).
>
> I've just been rereading some of Knuth's "The Art of Computer
> Programming."  I don't do it very often because I get a
> headache trying to understand his use of gotos, which aren't
> simply nested (directly convertable to structured loops)
> and which aren't error-handling-like (convertable to exceptions).
>
> So Python is not a well-designed language for direct
> translation of MIX code because it doesn't have gotos.

Indeed, such direct translation is not among Python's design
targets.  In general, reverse engineering low level code back
up to high levels is rather a nightmare anyway.

It's better to design and code at the higher level from the
start...


> No need to followup - just wanted to complain about MIX (again :)

Since when did lack of need stop me?-)


Alex