That's a very thoughtful response, and I appreciate it. Thanks.

I agree with you that formal proofs never happen in a practical world, and I'm not about to give up 'last', 'next', and multiple return points from subs; they really do seem to make life easier. And often the alternative is additional flags and tests that make the code, as you pointed out, more verbose. They also can make the code more complicated to read, in my opinion.

While I understand where people are coming from with respect to desiring pure code that can be formally proven, there are precious few people who could even begin to formally prove the algorithm needed to accomplish this "first row" task. I couldn't. But there are those who live in a more theoretical world where producing results in the form of "getting the job done" is a secondary concern.

Dijkstra may not have been crazy, and MJD's blog does a good job of explaining the reasons. But his sanity existed in the world of computer science rather than the world of computer programming.

By the way; I liked what Knuth had to say about the term "Computer Science". Paraphrasing, he said, "We wouldn't call surgery 'knife science'." He seemed to consider the term unfortunately applied. ...I don't recall what he thought would have been more applicable though.


Dave

In reply to Re^4: An exploration of higher-level-language approaches to the "First all-zero row in an NxN matrix" problem (goto Considered Harmful) by davido
in thread An exploration of higher-level-language approaches to the "First all-zero row in an NxN matrix" problem (goto Considered Harmful) by davido

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