problems/risks due to programming language

James Buster bitbug at lonewolf.sun.com
Fri Feb 23 17:16:58 AEST 1990


In article <8133 at hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu at hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) writes:
> C's switch statement is badly designed, so badly designed that it is 
> common practice to use break statements by the dozen in order to get 
> it to behave reasonably.  A more sensible design would give the switch 
> the semantics of the Ada case statement, thereby saving countless lines 
> of code through the elimination of all those "break" statements. 
>
> Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe at hubcap.clemson.edu

I claim that the possibly erroneous replication of code required by the Ada
case statement, e.g.

-- in approximate Ada style
switch foo is
    case 5 =>
	statement1;
	statement2;
	statement3;
    case 7 =>
	statement1;
	statement2;
	statement3;
end

as compared too C's

switch (foo)
{
    case 5:
    case 7:
	statement1;
	statement2;
	statement3;
}

is well worth remembering to put in break statements.
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