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>Of course I agree much has to do with personal preference, as long as the code keeps to be readable and maintainable. Sad point is that there are too many definitions of "readable and maintainable" < sigh > .

I repeat again that I started my contribution noting that this really is all about personal preference.

I think there's been success in avoiding a general conclusion that EXIT/LOOP are evil commands that are never to be used.

The next phase may be to get people to avoid getting cold sweats when they are reading code that has a (some) EXIT/LOOP line(s) in it because all that does is prejudice the reader and so toughen his/her job. For (generally) no good reason.

By the way I can't see ever agreeing that DO CASEs coded specifically to execute every CASE statement (faking a FALSE condition on each to make it happen) is EVER READABLE. IF your definition of readable is fewer indentations then you may think you have a winner, but in fact you don't. I bet that 98% of people debugging someone else's program expects that a DO CASE is testing for (more or less) independent conditions where 1 is EXPECTED TO BE TRUE. What you say is fine is totally contrary to the design intention of DO CASE and in my opinion is genuinely a cop-out from doing things properly. Just because DO CASE *can* be used that way does not make it reasonable to do so. Curious that you feel that you can successfully avoid EXIT/LOOP in your own code (and get worried when you see it in others) yet you happily use a construct exactly against it clear design intention! I'd say yours is one example of the definition of "readability" that could use some reconsideration.

Cheers

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>Walter,