goto, cls, wait commands

[Jeff Shannon]

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