"Goto" statement in Python

[Mikhail V]

On 12 April 2017 at 02:44, Nathan Ernst <nathan.ernst at gmail.com> wrote:
> goto is a misunderstood and much misaligned creature. It is a very useful
> feature, but like nearly any programming construct can be abused.
>
> Constructs like 'break', 'continue' or 'next' in languages like Python or
> C/C++ are goto's with implied labels.
>
> As Mikhail said, goto's can be great to break out of nested loops (only a
> handful of languages support named 'breaks').
>
> So, instead of:
> bool found = false;
> for (int i = 0; i = ...; ++i)
> {
>  for (int h = 0; h = ...; ++h)
>  {
>    if (some_condition)
>      found = true;
>  }
>  if (found) break;
> }
>
> You can have:
>
> for (int i = 0; i = ...; ++i)
> {
>  for (int h = 0; h = ...; ++h)
>  {
>    if (some_condition)
>      goto found;
>  }
> }
> // not found
>
> found:
> // handle found
>
> The second is better for a number of reasons: it's clearer. It has fewer
> variables (smaller stack), it has fewer branches (better for the CPU's
> branch prediction), and it has fewer instructions (better for CPU
> instruction cache).  This is a trivial, contrived example, but I've seen
> more than 4x nested loops using an exit flag like this (at every level of
> the loops) that could have been replaced with a lot less code.
>
> People need to stop drinking "X is considered harmful." Even Dijkstra later
> lamented that his "Goto considered harmful" paper was misinterpreted and
> misrepresented as advocating that goto should never be used.
>
> Additionally, I'd recommend everyone read '"Considered Harmful" Essays
> Considered Harmful': http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
>
> Regards,
> Nate
>



Here are recent related discussions about exiting from
nested loops (at least seems to be so):
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-March/044932.html
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-March/045049.html

I personally have difficulties to fully understand some
of the examples given in those proposals, namely
that proposals were thought for other(?) purposes also,
not only breaking nested loops.

At a first glance it seems to me that "goto" would solve
the nested breaking problem and in a nice flexible way.
(correct  me if I am wrong, probably I'm missing something)

So besides nested loops, in my practice I had occasions
when I would want to use "goto".
It would be fair to say that those occasions are not so common,
but I'll try to give an example. Say, there is some
pure procedural processing for some simple task
and I don't want to make the script heavy and just
care for the clarity:

===========
Log = ""
S = "lorem ipsum"

for s in S:
    if s == "i" :
        message = "found on stage 1"
        goto .output

S = S + " hello world"
for s in S:
    if s == "d" :
        message = "found on stage 2"
        goto .output

print "not found"
print "S = ", S
goto .exit

.output
print message
Log = Log + message

.exit:
print "exiting"
=============

For me it looks clear and I'd say easy to comprehend,
Main critic would be obviously that it is not
a good, *scalable application*, but quite often I don't
even have this in mind, and just want to express a
step-by-step direct instructions.
In this case sticking any "def():.." inside the script
does not make any sense for me. Simplicity here
reflects the fact that this code represents
exactly what I want the computer to do.

And a working variant of this would be like:

===========
Log = ""
found = False
Error = False
S = "lorem ipsum"

if not found:
    for s in S:
        if s == "i" :
            message = "found on stage 1"
            found = True

if not found:
    S = S + " hello world"
    for s in S:
        if s == "d" :
            message = "found on stage 2"
            found = True

if not found:
    Error = True
    print "Error : not found"
    print "S = ", S


if not Error:
    print message
    Log = Log + message

print "exiting"
==============

This is working code, but I would say there is
a lot extra indentation, and if I don't care about
application scalability, those are just adding noise
and I it needs some boolean flags.

I am not sure what examples to add here ...
it seems to me that e.g. if I would use Python
for modelling "pipeline" algorithms
this could be helpful also.

Now if I count in the nested loops breaking problematic,
seems that there is at least a prerequisite for existence of "goto".
Am I right?


Mikhail