Breaking out of several nested loops

[Henry Spencer]

> ...and the parent article suggests ripping this nest out into a separate
> procedure which has, as parameters, all of the variables needed in the nest
> of control constructs--this allows replacing the "goto" with a "return". 
> I guess the trailing-line-eater bug got the parent article, 'cause there
> wasn't a ":-)" at the end.
> 
> I'm sure glad to see that someone would violate all concepts of modularity
> (yanking part of the innards out of a procedure), clean interface (defining
> a new procedure without regard to how many parameters might be needed),
> and, dare I say the word, efficiency.  ...

Gee, I've always found that modularity and clean interface were *improved*
by breaking the innards out into a separate function any time they start
getting non-trivial.  As an accidental side effect of this, "return" then
suffices for multi-level exits.  And it's never produced any efficiency
problems in my stuff.  Efficiency is the standard excuse for ugliness,
and that's usually all it is:  an excuse.

Note that I am not suggesting that you can retrofit this approach into
existing code without rethinking said code to make it clean and modular.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry