[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

things that seemed important back in the '70s are no longer an issue for SW. Back in the 70's mainframe computers only had 32 to 64 k (not megs, thousands) bytes of memory

Something like 90% of microprocessors sold are for use in embedded systems. The vast majority of those are still 8 bit. Many embedded systems are still constrained by the same issues as those in the '70s (obvious example: our new robot controller has only 1800 bytes of memory).

you would be hard pressed to find appications today where memory utilization or processor speeds are really an issue

Maybe not in the desktop world. Embedded systems are still very concerned about these issues. Code execution speed is still a critical factor for things such as interrupt handlers and device drivers.

and in those cases, you dont code in C, you write assembly code for the critical functions.

Not necessarily true. My above example of device drivers and interrupt handlers are quite often written in C, but still need to execute very quickly. In fact, I'm working with code for a device driver right now that's written in C and makes use of a goto (no, I didn't write it).

the greatest expense in SW is debugging and code updates and maintance. Clarity and readability is EVERYTHING.

Of course. However, if you're trying to make a device that sells for $5 with an embedded processor in it, you may not have the option of using as much RAM as you like or having the fastest processor.

I wasnt kidding when I said the SW courses I took in college (6 semisters), you got an automatic F if you used them - there was no recourse or arguing with the professor either - THATS how serious of an issue these shortcuts are.

The same would have been true in my software engineering courses. However, that was because all of the problems on those homework assignments and exams could be done cleanly without gotos, and they didn't specify "make this code work in as few cycles as possible."