Might have been because of the `else if (ch == 'q') break;` line. If he used a switch statement he would have needed to use a goto to break out of the loop.
That's a reasonable guess, but a return would work there. I think I did it this way because all the breaks you need in a switch are noisy -- too noisy if you'd like to write one action per line. However, you can mute the noise by lining it up:
switch (getchar ()) {
break; case ' ': enter_text ();
break; case 'f': view = formulas;
break; case 'h': col = (col == 0 ? 0 : col-1);
which also makes oops-I-forgot-the-break hard to miss. I hadn't thought of that pattern yet. (You could define a macro for "break; case" too; my friend Kragen calls that IF.)
But I mostly stopped coding in C after around this time.
Interestingly, in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/paperalgo, I haven't yet run into the desire to have more than one `case` in a pattern-matching `switch`. I just added that piece of code from Vicissicalc to the paperalgo page.
Not exactly. But it does create a no-op default. I've never seen/used this pattern, so I would have to go compile this down into assembly and play with it to give you a more complete answer.
Dropped by dead-code elimination. A compiler might conceivably issue a warning that the first break is unreachable, though that's never happened so far.
Seconded! Also I would like to see comments on how programming styles in general have changed over the years - does a 80's era high-quality program still look like a 2010's high-quality program once you factor out the syntactic sugar?
I find it fascinating that larger traditional languages have changed little over time, while the languages of front-end development seems to change daily.
My coding style seemingly morphs about every few months now. It's sad to think stuff I wrote even three years ago I would never show someone interviewing me or put it in a portfolio nowadays.
This should only be true during the early days of your career. If you're out of the novice stage, you shouldn't be writing hateful code – maybe there's a new library to use or something you now understand about the problem but that's hardly the level of hatred.
