Essentially it is something like goto but only for loops and labeled blocks.
I'm curious to see what's the worst example you can think of using labels?
Or is there by any chance a very useful way to use them?
The possibilities are endless!
Essentially it is something like goto but only for loops and labeled blocks.
I'm curious to see what's the worst example you can think of using labels?
Or is there by any chance a very useful way to use them?
The possibilities are endless!
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Top comments (14)
break LABEL; is actually pretty common code
Sure, you guys are talking about the worst way... but what about the BEST way?
Labels are used together with
goto
statements (continue
in JavaScript case), which encourage really unpredictable coding techniques and thus bad style that should be avoided. Having execution order controlling constructions likeif
statement and loops must be enough; once you define a loop there's no way to enter this loop skipping the initialization phase, the same is true for anif
orelse
clause. Seeing a label in the source code cannot help you understand what's going on because you could possibly jump to this point from anywhere within the same file, under any circumstances.On the other hand, the ability to stop the execution of not only an inner loop but also of any of outside ones using
break <LABEL>
seems much more reasonable at first glance. However, I would assume if you have a need to do that something might be really wrong with the algorithm you use - and it's better to revise it instead of using labeled breaks.I actually knew about that, but really, it's more of a curiosity than anything. Like in "see this weird trick in JavaScript!" "What?! Weiiiird..." Turns out that
foo: 42
is a label followed by a number and not a key/value pair.In JavaScript, especially in modern development, labels are basically useless.
The only decent use case is to break out of multiple loops. But then again, it's a very limited case where for some reason you have to use loops instead of a functional approach.
Fortunately they're not! 😂
In PHP we have e.g.
continue 2;
(continue the parent loop), orbreak 3;
(break the grandfather loop) for this purpose ;)We have
goto
but there's basically no legitimate use for it. The docs page has a bit of an Easter egg agreeing with that :p php.net/manual/en/control-structur...Uh. That's even worse. Now instead of a descriptive label, one has to count the nested loops to find out what the heck this statement affects.
I don't prefer it, just stating it's there ;-)
My favourite is Swift that has
continue label
orbreak label
to refer to what to continue or break, but no accompanyinggoto
which I think is an important safety decision.developer.apple.com/library/conten...
This is actually a thing in Rust too.
Just that in Rust it is actually being used.
The best example is breaking out of nested loops:
(taken from rustbyexample.com)
Edit: Imagine for example a "mainloop". Usually it's a
while running
where running is a global mutable variable or something.In Rust you don't need that condition, you can just break out of the outer loop.
Edit 2: This is especially useful since blocks in Rust can return a value. This way you can use a
loop
and break out of it with a value.This is comparable to inlining a function that contains a loop and returns.
The worst potential issue I can come up with is that it's probably not clear what is going on in the code to the average JavaScript developer who is unaware of this language feature. Anything so uncommon is inherently dangerous.
When I first started programming as a kid (c. 2004) I loved BASIC, so I took every opportunity to look for BASIC compilers and interpreters on every platform I had. As a number of other commenters have implied, this is the only way of simulating BASIC's
GOTO
statements, so I had a relatively early exposure to this feature! Having said that, I have never used it in JavaScript (and now write much better code than in my childhood :')I didn't know this. I hope most people don't either. (Please don't use them)
Edit: An oldie, but a goodie that can have many parallels to this:
u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_...
I bet this post will spawn a bunch of new frameworks called "label.js" utilising this powerful feature...
I hope there is an initiative to remove them from the language specs.