Working around a lack of 'goto' in python

[Anton Vredegoor]

David MacQuigg <dmq at gain.com> wrote:

>I once had a boss who wrote a 70-page program in BASIC.  After a few
>weeks, he gave up and expected me to fix it.  After seeing that the
>whole thing was one module, laced with GOTO's, I told him that I could
>re-write the whole thing in less time than it would take to debug his
>program.  He did not want to hear that.  He also thought it would take
>too much time to explain to me what the program was supposed to do!

You are not alone. I once had a boss who programmed a database in
Pascal using doubly linked lists and pointers. Another programmer had
just started learning to program for a month and designed a GUI using
Delphi. The problem was that somehow he managed to hardcode the
positions of the widgets so that they were not resizable or movable
and since he developed them on a bigger monitor they didn't appear on
the visible parts of my screen. 

I was asked to link the database to the GUI within two weeks. Probably
I could have done it if allowed to use the structures for databases
and GUI interface that Delphi comes with out of the box.

We were all using different incompatible versions of Delphi and
communicated via incompatible telephone line interfaces. So all data
was garbled everytime it was transmitted, independently from the
version incompatibilities. To finish it off, after a week a
coordinator was assigned to the project who didn't know anything about
programming at all.

I'm still recovering from that. However, since it was one of the
factors that tipped the balance towards Python for me, I guess I was
lucky after all.

Anton