Coping with deeply nested control structures

  • Authors:

  • G R Perkins;R W Norman;S Danicic

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing, Polytechnic of North London, Holloway Road, London N7, U.K.;Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing, Polytechnic of North London, Holloway Road, London N7, U.K.;Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing, Polytechnic of North London, Holloway Road, London N7, U.K.

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGPLAN Notices
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

Over the past three or four years SIGPLAN Notices has published a number of papers on the problem of deeply nested IF-THEN-ELSE structures. We maintain that the current editorial ban on proposals for new control structures is correct, not only for reasons of space in SIGPLAN Notices, but on the grounds that programmers (like any other workers) should resist the temptation to blame their tools when they come up with poor products.Here, we briefly indicate a few techniques for dealing with deeply nested structures, and suggest that working programmers develop other such techniques and publish papers about them, rather than merely ask the language designers for yet more constructs.