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Karen Mitchelle wrote: Curse you SQL Server 2008 R2!
There, doesn't that feel better now? 
Good rant!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Where's Part I ? Is it your post from 11-Jul-14 0:13 ?
Karen Mitchelle wrote: I had problems
That doesn't tell us much.
Karen Mitchelle wrote: SSIS package
That says quite a bit.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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Running into a feature-by-feature language comparison made me think back of a feature I saw in one single langugage, but would fit very nicely into a lot of the pascal/c/java/... class of languages: Alternate loop exits.
When iterating through a list, an array or some sort of collection, objects are not all treated equally: You reach a sentinel, find the object you're searching for, reach the capacity of the bucket you are filling up, or whatever. The job has successfully been done, so you exit the loop. Or, you do not complete the job: There is no sentinel (because the buffer is completely filled), the desired object is not found, or the bucket has still some capacitly left.
Running through the collection to the end or not running to the end are different situations, frequently requiring different handling. In most languages, an early exit requires that you set some boolean flag decleared outside the loop, then break (or whatever the keyword is in your favorite language), and after the loop you add an if-statement, syntactically detached from the loop, to provide differnt treatment based on the setting of the flag.
I was programming in this language called Planc - "Programming LANguage for Nord Computers", a vendor specific systems implementation - remmebered by noone today. It had this nice syntactic sugar:
for listpointer in listhead:nextfield do
... processing list element as desired
while listpointer.keyvalue <> desidred_key
... porcessing list element as desired
exitwhile
... the desired list element was found,
write("list element was found and processed")
exitfor
... reached end of list without finding the desired element
write("no element with the desired key was found in the list")
endfor
No need for any one-time-use bool cluttering up variable space. No need to introduce a separate block for testing and breaking out. No need for a detached if-statement - the different loop exit handling is syntactically integrated with the loop itself.
I never saw this sort of construct in any other language, but I have been missing it hundred of times. Are there other languages out there with something similar? Certainly not C, C++, Java, C#, Pascal, ...
And, by the way: The above specification of the iteration is a nice syntactic sugar for what would be in C-like languages:
for (listptrtype listpointer = listhead; listpointer != null; listpointer = listpointer->nextfield) {
The Planc syntax is certainly more readable and less error prone, but the two are functionally equivalent.
The exitwhile/exitfor mechanism was valid whether the iteration was over a list, an array or some arbitrary collection, and both were optional: if one (or both) of the loop exits required no special handling, you could leavie that entire clause out.
Gee, I wish I could get that mechanism into, say, C#! The "while" part would be simple: Just add an optional condition after the break ("break (listpointer.keyvalue == desired_key);". Adding exitwhile/exitfor would require two more reserved words, which always causes problems and protests (even though I guess that very few variables out there are named exitwhile or exitfor...).
I once tried to construct C #define macros to emulate it, but never succeeded (if I remember right, the problem was generating jump labels for the gotos). If anyone has tried something similar, give me a hint!
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Shirley, using goto is simpler.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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burn the heretic, burn him I say
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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Lookit, you might not actually type the word goto, but when you compile your code, every transition from one statement to another is translated into a goto.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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burn him (since when has facts got in the way of religion) burn the heretic
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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Yup, religions want to be the middle man (between man and god, man and his money, etc.), so they love middle-man things, like all these statements that do nothing more than abstract the goto.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Since we are not burning the heretic yet... Are we talking about singapore[•] or the conference[○] 
For those not sure what they are reading now. This is most likely your face![Green Alien | [Alien]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/alien.gif) right about now
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· · · <small>Please Wait</small> · · ·
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If we are not going to burn him then I going to sulk
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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As long as you do it quietly.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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humph
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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We don't need no water, let the ... 
»»» <small>Loading Signature</small> «««
· · · <small>Please Wait</small> · · ·
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Now I'm going to have to visit that place.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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You tell me
»»» <small>Loading Signature</small> «««
· · · <small>Please Wait</small> · · ·
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Certainly not the conference.
Not one of the presentations is about the goto.
They should be done for false advertising.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I believe you'll find that all those accounts written hundreds of years after the alleged events were entirely factual... 
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Not true: in some machines it's called a JUMP instruction instead!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Ah, but if you look at the compiled machine code, it's exactly the same, so JUMP is just another abstraction of goto.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: when you compile your code, every transition from one statement to another is translated into a goto.
Assuming that the "another" statement is not the one immediately following.
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Why? Using a goto to exit a loop is one its few (perhaps only) valid use cases.
/ravi
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I've been known to use it for "load variable amounts of stuff from DB as needed" and use goto to get to the cleanup/UI enabling at the end. It probably comes from the habit of preferring:
void someFunc()
{
if (!A)
return;
DoStuffWithA()
DoMoreCrud();
}
rather than
void someFunc()
{
if (A)
{
DoStuffWithA();
DoMoreCrud();
}
}
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Was your reply meant for another post?
My name is not Shirley. Sure, my post was about flow control, and could compile into goto (/jump) instructions, they are certainly not The Answer in this case.
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An elegant solution, Shirley! 
Will Rogers never met me.
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