Hang on now...

...is it, just maybe, possible that the industry with the largest fractional job losses¹ to LLMs to far could be troll farms?²

I mean, I'm not sure how we would tell. Even if a few countries have some employment data that covers the case, there's no way the big players are putting it out there. But it seems like a really good use case: take a small model that produces good output in the few to few-dozen words range, post train it for your ideological bent and let it loose. If you need to, you can use something a little smarter as the agentic driver. The task is requesting web pages, parsing out threads, and posting or replying (more HTML events). This is stuff there are skills for all over the places.

It's not like it's good news even if it's true: it makes a bad problem and the people in charge aren't the ones getting hurt.

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¹ Real job losses: not dog-and-pony-show we "cut" jobs we wanted to get rid for stock-price manipulation purposes, say it's AI, than hire as many roles back again as soon as we vest or get the bonuses. As a side note: if you've offered one of those "oops, AI isn't ready just yet" positions you should drive a very hard, very expensive bargain.

² You know, the people that rouge states, criminal organizations, or political parties that you don't like and so on pay to spam opinionated, wrong, and non-constructive comments on social media.

Missing feature

Me

Hey CVA,¹ navigate to my Super Secret Lair.²

CVA

Okay. ::brings up a map::

Me, going bug-eyed

Dang CVA, why that way?

At this point CVA says nothing and you either follow it or not, which is not how you would interact with a human navigator. What we need is support for closing the loop on that question:

CVA

There are heavy delays on your usual routes.³

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¹ Creepy Voice Assistant

² For the traffic-aware routing. I know where the SSL is.

³ Knowing my "usual routes" would be just another creepy thing about the voice assistant but, oh, so useful. I'm gestating another post on the tension there.

How many featured guests does it take to change the "band" of an album?

Let's say, you're writing a music app. Something like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, or whatever. You will, of course, want to offer your users multiple ways to find music. A flexible search interface, a list of songs, a list of albums and so on. The fun comes if you decide to offer a list of artists. When should an album show up under a particular artist? How do you handle ensembles that aren't publishing as a named entity (i.e. it's by a bunch of people and not "by a band")? Worse still, how do you deal with tracks that include a featured guest artists on an album that is otherwise by a single person or band?

As a programmer who cares about users, my vote would be to accept some duplicate presentations due to fuzzy matching rather than risk disappointing a user who disagrees with my way of answering those questions. But that doesn't seem to be what Apple picked. Indeed, I simply can't deduce the logic (if any?) underlying how Apple Music handles these questions. In the album list one album can show up more than once, partitioned according to the performance credit for each song. An album by a band that has one song with a featured guest performer isn't enough to make that band show up in the list of artists.¹ WTF, Apple? What are you thinking? Just ... WHY?!?

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¹ I've ripped the True Love Never Dies from CD, but Otherwise doesn't show up in my artists list, because I only have that one album at it has one track featuring Ash Costello. Grrr...

Does any one know?

Did Sir Pterry every address the question of which divinty attends to tangled cables? I mean, it seems likely to me that the duty would fall to Anoia. Right?

Yes. Yes, she is.

When Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced, last year, that they had chosen a drummer to join them for a few more Rush shows, I was at once squealingly excited and deeply fearful. I mean, I knew intellectually that there is no way the guys would agree to go out with a less than fantastic drummer, but the emotions do not play by the same rules as reason. Well, I found a few videos and a few expert opinions, and that allayed much of my worry. And then a few months ago we go the video from the Juno awards and that was very promising. But there were a few lingering, irrational concerns. Was she good enough?

Well, I'm back from the opening show.¹

There is a lot that could be said about things like song selection (we go La Villa Strangiato and YYZ!), and the tributes to Neil (sniffling back tears), and how incredible Time Stand Still sounds with Aimee Mann harmonizing on stage, and on and on but I'll let others cover that.

The answer is unambiguous.

All the delicacy and subtlety on display in the videos I've seen of her earlier work was there, but when Neil's drum parts demand The Beast she's got that too.² The crowd's reaction to the first big fill in Tom Sawyer was emphatic, and Geddy's reaction to that was something to witness.

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¹ Thanks to Mrs. NoSwampCoolers for deciding that this was going to happen while tickets were still available.

² And while she looks completely different from Neil, in the hard parts her face carried the same grim determination. But when the drum chart was merely fast and demanding joy and satisfaction would break through.

A modest UI proposal

Not-good-at-tech mode

I begin to suspect that certain apps could use a new, over-arching control. One that (a) increases the size and weight of all text elements, (b) forces the facility into the lowest-common-denominator do-what-it-says-on-the-tin mode, and (c) hides all the complex controls. It should be easy to find and disable, of course, as we're not trying to take options away from anyone: just give them an easy button.

Though perhaps I should reconsider my proposed name for the feature...

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Full disclosure: I asked Gemma4:31b to write the CSS and HTML for the sample.

I wonder what the experts would think of my take?

Learned about "property based testing" today. A little. Initial impression: it's (at least in part) fuzzing at the unit test or integration test level instead of the end-to-end level.

Also I already do something like a lite version of that in a few cases. Indeed, I've been trying to formulate a good blog post about one of my practices that I don't see much in other discussions of unit testing. Alas, it seems there's a whole community out there stealing my thunder.

Now what?

I'm working in an unfamiliar code-base we're trying to revive. The code is in a language I have some experience with but am, none the less, far from expert in. I'm staring at some code that doesn't make any sense to me. Is that because the person who wrote it knew more than I do or the other way round?

Now, generally you'd assume the former because the original author presumably had a vision of what they wanted to accomplish and I'm still trying to piece together a theory of the crime for scattered hints, but in this cases I'm in the middle of refactoring a fairly inexplicable design decision into something more maintainable, so I know the original codew was fallible.

And, of course, there is nothing like a design document or even a few words on what they thought they were doing. All in all, another day at the office.

A DeCSS shirt for the late 2020s

So, I see a lot of wittering and gnashing of teeth about online age verification laws. Both in general and specifically as the apply to Linux, BSD, and other open source operating environments. I want to talk about some practical issues around what technology will have to emerge to make them "work" and how easily even moderately technologically aware people can, to be blunt, screw the laws over.

And I want to propose a new fashion that might, just, catch on in the next few years.

What is going on

A few juristictions (including Brazil and California) have passed legislation pertaining to online age reporting and many other jurisdiction seem to be following suit.

Allegedly these are intended—as so many, many bad ideas have been in the past—to Protect The Childred (tm).

They're not going to work any better than content labeling of music, the v-chip, or video game content rating (just to name a few) did¹. I recall a time when every stand-up comedian seemed to have a bit about how parents would have to get their seven-year-olds to program the v-chip just like the kid was the one who set up the VCR. But hey, we have to do something and this is something so obviously we have to do this. Not that I'm depressed by how predicatable all this is or anything.

Why it's weird for open source

There are a few of things going on here. One is structural, one is philosophical, and under all that is brute technological fact.

Structural

While Windows, MacOS, IOS, ChromeOS, and Android² are controlled by large coorporate entities that decide what their customers get to install, Linux, BSD, and other open source operating system are, in principle, fully under control of the individual installing them. The weasle words are in there because few people build out their system from raw parts: they mostly use a distribution, which does have a central point of control (though many offer much more customization that the you get from Apple or MicroSoft).

This is not a funcdametal issue; the kernel and or the encrustation of supporting code could feasibly (I won't say "easily" because I'm not the one programming it) be altered to support the requirements of the laws. And those changes could be incorporated in upcoming distribution releases and make their way out to the mass of users.

But it's not like there is one place to go to try to enforce this decision. Or even ten places. Keep in mind that even if some major distribution (perhaps Ubuntu) were to comply nothing stops a downstream re-packager (say Elementary) from removing, disabling or defanging that support. More on that later.

By the way, there are litteraly scores of distributions originating on all the inhabited continents and from various points in Oceana.

Philosophical

As a generic term "open source" covers a lot of ground, but central to the that nebulous mass broadly known as the open-source/free-software movement we find Creative Common, the Open Source Iniitive, and the Free Software Foundation all of which of are organizations with some money, rather more precisely specified definitions, and some very strong opinions on matters of software control and human flourishing. And they're not the only ones. In fact the space is just crawling with various NGOs that provide legal support, lobbying services, publicity, and (obviously) software packaging.

The whole "the government is telling you how to build your software" thing isn't going down well. You may expect resistance at many levels. Anyone else own a DeCSS shirt?

The foundational reality of Open Source

Programmers program. In one sense that's a tautology, but it has profound implications.

Before delving into what it means for this issue, let's just talk about what it means for organizational cyber security. My employer has recently gone through a series of IT security exercises in an effort to lock down all the possible cyber threats. And they have a problem: what programers do on a day to day basis is indistinguishable from a large class of threats. We create new executables not known to the system and run them. Often dozens of times a day. And that is unavoidable: you can't have the benefits of what programmers do without having the relative chaos of programmers at work.

Similarly, you can't have open source and still be confident that everyone is running the nannyware you insist on. Remember that I said a downstream distributor could strip-out or neuter a reporting facility installed by an upstream provider? Well, in principle every single user is a downstream provider with that same capability. Worse, capable programers can provide tools to enable less capable people to perform the necessary modifications. Indeed, Ageless Linux is already pushing back against early complinace efforts on the part of systemd (the dominant, but often derided, init system on major Linux distros).

Legal aside

I think the intent is that anyone modifying the softawre is the "Provider" that the government enforcers can go after, but if that's just a couple of techy parents who don't want their machine identifying their minor childern to the wider internet, there is a "parent's rights" argument to hang a political and legal challange on.

But ... talk to an actual lawyer in your actual jurisdiction with actual expertese on the legal system you actually might be picked on by before counting on that kind of thing. K?

Speculation on implementation and countermeasures

From ten kilometer altitude, communication between a user's machine and a software store or other endpoint that might want to use a age signal can take one of two forms, and one of them is harder than the other for actual installed systems. You see, one machine has to initiate the conversation, and if that's the store's server, then many home and corporate firewalls will drop the packets on the floor.³ For that reason I suspect the industry will settle on a strategy where the user machine asks the server for a one-off token, hands that to a local age-reporting API which cryptographically mixes it with the answer, and the mixed data is then relayed back to the server for decoding. There are other things they could try, but they're all pretty fragile.

Anyway, on Linux the bit that builds the reply would either be built into the kernel itself or in a kernel module, but either way a savy user will be able to disable them. Then they just substitute a dummy system that respects the protocol, but always returns a least-interesting answer to every query (Yeah, this user is of age. Trust me.).

What Ageless does is more than that: it removes the infrastructure and storage that could be used to respond, which is a good thing, but the above is enough to stop making meaningful responses. And I'll bet a bottle of scotch that the dummy responder can be constructed with code that will fit on a t-shirt.

Intent

I'll write the thing as soon as the spec is available (or grab someone else's if it's avilable, because I'm not stuck about this sort of thing). And then I'll be printing shirts. And maybe hoodies, too. You never know.

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¹ Which is to say that (a) the kinds of parents who take the trouble to monitor their kids' media consumption will have another tool while other kinds will completely ignore it and (b) the kids will not only find ways around the tech, they'll use the system to advise them where the "good" content is.

² Android is a little weird, because while Google (whatever name they're going by now) controls the system, many devices ship with manufacture customized versions. But it is still the case that there is a corporate entity for the government to go after.

³ And maybe report them to an intrusion detection system, but that's not really relevant here.

Modifier precedence in English

Languages often build more complex ideas by combining symbols for simpler ideas. How this works in any particular language is governed by some set of rules or another. It's pretty typical to divide the rules into (at least) two groups: some tell you what symbols can go where (grammar), and other tells you what it means when you put them there (semantics).

To clarify the difference, let's some example rules from each family across a set of natural and synthetic languages. Some example of syntactic rules are:

English

Prepositions are generally followed by objects or object phrases

Algebra

An equal-sign, other equivalence symbol, or inequality has an expression on each side either explicitly or implicitly

C

A declaration consists of one or more identifiers (with optional initializers) and information about their type¹

Notably these are all about the grouping (and sometimes order) of language symbols (words and punctuation) in the text. By contrast, semantic rules are about the meaning of combinations of symbols.

English

Appending "ly" to many nouns converts them into associated adjectives²

Algebra

Compound expressions are reduced by respecting grouping symbols to identify sub-expression, followed by applying exponentiation, then applying multiplicative operations, and finally applying additive operations

C

A declaration gives the identifier(s) meaning within the program and instructs the compile on how it (they) can be used (the type information).

The fun part of this is that none of it is forced on it. Both sets of rules are devised by people for people reasons. In "natural" languages this comes about slowly and often organically for reasons that I certainly don't understand. Talk to a linguist. In programming languages some person or small group of people sat down and consciously decided them (though after the first couple of decades there came to be some broad consensus understanding to build upon).³

An advantage of someone making a deliberate decision shows up when you have complicated rules. The originator can write down an authoritative description of the method and that's that. For instance, the c-declaration int (*normalized_comp)(unsigned, const char *, const char *) may be pretty complex,⁴ but by looking up the procedure in The C Programming Language, the standard document or some website, we can know with certainty that "normalize_comp" is a pointer to a function taking three arguments (one unsigned integer, and two pointers to const characters) and returning a integer value.⁵

My beef today is about the rules for expressing frequency in English. In particular, we can use the "ly" suffix formation discussion about to modify a time-period into a frequency. Monthly. Daily.

Fine.

But we also have access to some prefixes that modify the number of thing: "bi" and "semi" for two and one-half are common in this use.

Alas, there is no authoritative author's document to tell us if "biweekly" should be interpreted as "twice weekly" or as "every two weeks". I'm fairly sure it's the former, but...

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¹ I'm going to ignore the wrinkle in which multiple identifiers in a single declaration can have different type when some of them are pointers. Those of you who need to know, know. And for the rest of you it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

² I'm also going to largely ignore the irregularities of English. They are other ways to make adjectives but, again, it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

³ The algebraic symbols and order of operations is an intermediate case. It came to be through an organic process of push-n-pull in a community, but it was a small community and the candidates were generally formed deliberately by one or a few participants. Fun stuff.

⁴ This kind of thing is hard enough that a typical course in c includes a bunch of exercises in how to read these thing, but in case you fall out of practice there is a tool (cdecl) just to help you out.

⁵ Experienced c-programmers will likely intuit still another layer of meaning. Guessing that the pointer arguments are probably meant to point to character buffers (that is strings) rather than single characters, and the return value probably takes on values in the range -1 to +1 ala strcmp. The name of that layer is "idiom", and like in natural languages it is required to be really fluent. Our hypothetical experienced program might also have a guess about the initial argument (unsigned, so probably a size, so probably the max number of characters to compare...), but that is not so well established in the idiom.

Hey, ya wanna help?

Here's the thing about smart phones: you cannot reasonably prop them between your shoulder and you ear. Not only will you get an instant muscle cramp (and probably scoliosis within minutes if you persisted), but the thing won't actually stay there. In that respect they really, deeply suck.

But whatever. Price you pay for the benefits of the form factor. Or whatever.

That said, this has a consequence: if someone calls and (a) you don't feel you can skip it, (b) you still need to have both hands for something (anything) other than the phone, and (c) you don't currently have your buds in then you must, in short order:

1. answer the call
2. switch to speaker
3. prop the phone somewhere

Presumably the people who write the UI for these things have this experience, too.

But recently with my phone, when I tap to answer, the UI goes through some flashy, battery-draining, nonsensical animation which results in the hang-up control landing right where the change-the-audio-button was a moment before. I have no words.

Random musings

If you found yourself in the same room as whatever self-satisfied twit is responsible for foisting "liquid glass" on us and asked the two nearest other iPhone users if they wanted to help administer a swirly, what do you think the odds would be?

I put them over 2/3, personally.

Having your "Smart" and your "Open", too

This is the third of a group of of posts on "Smart" appliance. You don't strictly need the first and second entries one to read this, but they're meant to be building up a common context. In this episode I talk about a mechanism that would relieve most of my worries about these devices while allowing manufactures to maintain control of their trade secretes and the presentation of their interfaces.

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My complaints in the first post aren't intrinsic. Instead they are complaints about a particular implementation of the smart model where the physical device requires a specific (rather than generic) piece of paired software; in that implementation our intellectual property regime around software puts the manufacturer in control your ability to have that software, and consequently puts the manufacture in control of your ability to use an physical device that you bought. That is totally unacceptable.

Out strategic goals are

• Possession of the physical device grants access to its functionality¹ because the requisite software is generic enough to be re-implemented on any suitable platform.
• The manufacture gets to keep their trade secrets to themselves.²

That's an interesting pair, because the first requires that the trade secrets be physically embodied in the machine (otherwise you can't guarantee that the functionality moves with the physical object). But that seems to be in tension with the second requirement, because how can the manufacturer control trade secrets if they're trading freely around the economy?

The thing is that the control software (which is already on board) also encodes the trade secrets. Anyone with the right tools and knowledge can already can extract the firmware, decompile it, and sus out the meaning of resulting code. It's just that that's a pretty hard trick (those boards don't need debug ports and I'd be unsurprised to find that many don't have them) and consequently time consuming and expensive. Then, as always, the legal regime puts up further barriers to someone trying to compete using that approach.

And we deal with systems that have those properties all the time. I'm describing a client-server architecture. The appliance is the server, your phone or tablet is the client, and the manufacturer can hide as much detail as they want server-side. By using open protocols for interchange and open standards to present the interface consumers get a extortion-free way to talk to the appliance, and in return manufacturers get reduced software development costs and all-platform³ functionality for free. It's that easy.

My hot-take, off-the-cuff, proposal for the whole thing: HTML5.

Literally put a little web-server inside every appliance. They already have non-trivial computers and at least one of WiFI or Bluetooth, so this is not a stretch. In the worst case users can use a plain web-browser to access it.⁴ With HTML5, manufacturers can control every aspect of their interface (I mean their pages can just be a canvas if they're that hung up on controlling the appearance), control how much functionality is pushed to the client-side, and so on.

What's not to like?⁵

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¹ All of it. If you own the thing, you own it. This is non-negotiable.

² Within reason. There is no way to guarantee this absolutely, and (importantly) never has been. Anyone with the tools and expertise has always been able to reverse engineer a product, and it was only ever the high cost of reverse engineering and IP law that prevented them from taking that route to develop a competing product. We're looking for a regime where the level of difficulty in obtaining and profiting from the trade secrets remains similarly high.

³ And not just iOS and Android, either. Everything, everywhere, all at once. As it were.

⁴ I imagine the ecosystem will rapidly spawn a genre of specialized appliance control apps with a HTML renderer at the core, and featuring convenience functions for organization and access, but a plain web-browser provides a fallback position.

⁵ Okay, so there is the addressing problem for devices that use WiFI. Some kind of discovery mechanism will be needed, and I don't know— off the top of my head—what the options for that are. But it's not like this is a new problem: printers and scanners, especially, already handle this in a variety of ways. Similarly bluetooth has a pairing problem to solve, but that's an issue for existing bluetooth devices as well.

The "Smart" appliance policy at Casa NoSwampCoolers

By way of introduction to some follow up posts: appliances that require a external computer to make them go are a kind of cyber vulnerability. The utility of the device is dependent on the availability of a working interface and thus on the whims of a third party. If they drop support; if they decide to lock some features behind a paywall;¹ if they don't support the app on the platform you use, your device is worthless.

While someone could, in principle, program a new interface there are a number of problems:

• Access to information about the device side of the interface. This stuff is trade secrets, and the holders rarely see it as profitable to share it, even if they are no longer supporting the affected devices.
• Good engineering practce may suggest using a a common code base, but manufacturers are also willing to switch hardaware platfomrs to minimize costs. The result is a lot of diversity even within single product lines, as witnessed by the long running struggle to support various peripheries in the linux kernel.
• Finally there are legal barriers to the "just hack it scheme". In the US, for instance, the DMCA, means that the most trival effort by the manufacture to "protect" their kit makes the hacking job a felenoy. Until the right to repair is legally recognized,² this multiplies the difficulties improsed by the others.

So here in Casa NoSwampCoolers we have a three part policy:

• No device which requies an account registered with the manufacturer.
• No device which requies an app provided by the manufacture to access it's core function.
• Any device which requires an app to access special features or functions must be explicitly discussed by the grownups prior to purchase.

The second part of this series will address the engineering reasons in favor of "use you device to control it", and the third will look at a solution that lets us have the upsides without the downsides.

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¹ No names, BMW.

² I consider that a cause worth my political dollars. Would you care to join me?

Wait, how many nodes?!?

My employer has been working through a IT security upgrade process, and recently performed a dry-run of an upcoming external audit. They report that they didn't find anything surprising or particularly worrying, but they took the opportunity to roll out new and updated employee agreements for just about everything computing related. Use of company network resources and email addresses, protection of company hardware, and so on. Including a new agreement for work-from-home.

That WFH agreement is the one that caught my eye. Buried in a lengthy bulleted list was a requirement to have anti-virus on "every other system on the network". We have—currently—one windows box, one antiquated mac, a networked Epson printer, a few linux systems, three phones, an e-book reader and a bushel (or at least a peck) of tablets. How does that mess fit in?

I run Clam AV on all the Linux devices (I have reason to think that will be considered sufficient). My wife's windows system has Windows defender, and I'm told that's okay. But what about the antique Mac (even if I only boot it occasionally), and those tablets, phones, and readers? And what about guests: we have a bunch of people who come to visit bringing phones, computers and tablets with them, and common hospitality requires that we offer them connectivity.

Then, as I started to think about it, I realized that this list was incomplete. Like, seriously, incomplete. I mean, the PlayStation 4 is just the beginning. Despite an disinterest in "Smart Home" stuff, we have a number of things that could reasonably be characterized as IoT devices.

So I launched into the hardware identification stage of a network security audit this morning.

We have two smart TVs; two other WiFI equipped appliances (though we have not configured their WiFi connections), and at least ten other WiFi connected nodes providing minor but useful services. That's circa thirty devices sharing a single network segment. And it got that way one, little choice at a time, without us really noticing.

My current thinking is that I need to segment the network to isolate guest and IoT devices from our primary computing resources and run at least some basic intrusion detection. Fun, eh?

Getting to do grown-up things

We took the seven year-old to an art museum yesterday so that Mommy and Daddy could see a traveling exhibit focused on a single artist.

And not only was it not a disaster, after a while she disengaged from the iPad and took an active interest in the art. She has a favorite among the pieces we saw.¹ She remarked on how interesting it was to see the studies the painter did toward another large canvas.

Victory!

Well, at least a conditional win. We didn't stay to see any of the permanent exhibits because she was clearly done at that point. But still.

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¹ It's one of my top ten, too!

Why did all the numbers move to the back of my credit card?

One of my credit cards has a feature that baffles me: all the numbers are on the the same side¹ of the card.

Now, credit cards present an interesting trade-off problem between security and convenience. Bruce Schneier spends some time on the matter in one of his books. Maybe Liars and Outliers. A certain level of loss to fraud is accepted to ensure that the system is convenient and ubiquitous; and the history of the technology is an epic tale of continual re-tuning of the risks.

In the very early days the system was surprisingly simply, relying on people and paper. Really. By the time I came on the scene, the cards had raised numbers on the front to impress multiple copies of the transaction record on carbon papers. The "chunk, chunk" of the cashier making the impression was the sound track of eighties retail. Later we got smart cards and now touchless payment.²

Hey, Ma! Look at me! I'm living in the future!

And somewhere along there (late '90s) the "card security code" was added to the back. It didn't show up on the mechanical impressions (still in use then in the US, if not in really advanced parts of the world) or in a single-sided xerox of the card, so it made it slightly harder for bad actors to capture enough information to create fraudulent charges. Not really hard, mind you. Just hard enough. That's one of the surprising things about this story.

But now I have this card that has the CSC printed right next to the main card number and expiration date.³ Huh? Is that Okay because merchants are now using billing zip code as an additional (if very weak) authenticator? Or is it something else?

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¹ The side with the magnetic strip and opposite the conductive pads which I would describe as the back, but it's the fact that they're all on the same side that bothers me.

² The touchless systems marks one of the first moments I started to feel like technology was leaving me behind. Another unanticipated milestone.

³ It also has the main numbers printed flush on the surface of the card: they're not raised.

Goto is flow control!

I'm reading The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox: Preactical Skills for Developers Working with Legacy Code by Nathan Boccara. I'm not far enough in to have a settled opinion of the book, but I think I'm far enough along to describe it a "promising" at least.

Anyway, I'm in the first section of the book where he talks about understanding code you've just encountered. And I've already hit my second "Well, why didn't I think of that?" moment¹ where he suggests filtering functions to only display the flow control as a way of getting to know them. Fantastic idea and I feel like a dunce for leaving that option on the table for years, but I have a bone to pick with his implementation in the example he provides.

His example works on a piece of C++ code from an open source project, and he filters for

• if
• else
• for
• while
• do
• switch
• case
• try
• catch

which probably seems like a good list at first glance, but the function the very first flow control token in the example function is a label! And yeah, that means there is a goto further down.

Now, I almost never use goto, and when I do it's usually to jump to some clean-up or post-processing operation from nested scope. This one jumps beck outside a loop to do some re-initialization. Who knows if that is justified. Maybe it spares some extra nesting or multiple condition variables or something.

Whatever, I just think we ought to include goto and labels as part of the set "flow control" to filter on. And the same can be said for break, continue, and return.

Now maybe the author has a reason for the omission and just didn't tell us, and I'm guessing it makes little difference to the utility of the procedure, but I just had to get it off my chest. We now return you to your regularly scheduled life.

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¹ Thanks, Nathan!

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