To use goto or not?

Question

This question may sound cliched, but I am in a situation here.

I am trying to implement a finite state automaton to parse a certain string in C. As I started writin

Answer 1

I can't see much of a difference between goto and switch. I might prefer switch/while because it gives you a place guaranteed to execute after the switch (where you could throw in logging and reason about your program). With GOTO you just keep jumping from label to label, so to throw in logging you'd have to put it at every label.

But aside from that there shouldn't be much difference. Either way, if you didn't break it up into functions and not every state uses/initializes all local variables you may end up with a mess of almost spaghetti code not knowing which states changed which variables and making it very difficult to debug/reason about.

As an aside, can you maybe parse the string using a regular expression? Most programming languages have libraries that allow using them. The regular expressions often create an FSM as part of their implementation. Generally regular expressions work for non arbitrarily nested items and for everything else there is a parser generator(ANTLR/YACC/LEX). It is generally much easier to maintain a grammar/regex than the underlying state machine. Also you said you were on an internship, and generally they might give you easier work than say a senior developer, so there is a strong chance that a regex may work on the string. Also regular expressions generally aren't emphasized in college so try using Google to read up on them.