Date:         Thu, 13 May 2010 12:05:57 -0400
Reply-To:     Søren Lassen <s.lassen@POST.TELE.DK>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Søren Lassen <s.lassen@POST.TELE.DK>
Subject:      Re: Alternative for "goto" in do loop
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Perusing Knuths execellent paper
http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf
(Thank you, Michael!), I stumbled upon this little gem:

"Of course, event indicators are not the only decent alternatives to go to
statements that have been proposed. Many authors have suggested language
features which provide roughly equivalent facilities, but which are
expressed in terms of exit, jumpout, break, or leave statements. Kosaraju
[57] has proved that such statements are sufficient to express all programs
without go to's and without any extra computation, but only if an exit from
arbitrarily many levels of control is permitted."

Which seems to vindicate my personal GOTO policy quite adequately, namely
that GOTOs can be used instead of LEAVE when you need to break out of several
levels of nested loops, and (in SAS) STOP or DELETE(/RETURN) is too drastic.

Thanks to you all for an entertaining and enlightening discussion!
Søren