Ah yes, the arithmetic if.  Long ago, I wrote a short paper in the style of
"real programmers don't use pascal" defending the arithmetic if and
encouraging its adoption in newer languages. (All tongue in cheek, of
course.)

For fun, I found it, and put it up at www.skeeve.com/if.pdf.

Enjoy,

Arnold

"Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> A little Googling shows that the IF I mentioned was called the
> "arithmetic IF".   There was also a Computed GOTO that branched to
> one of N labels depending on the value of the expression.   And an
> Assigned GOTO whose main use, as I remember, was to allow for error
> recovery when a subroutine failed...
>
> Steve 
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dave Horsfall" <dave at horsfall.org>
> To:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Cc:
> Sent:Sun, 13 Aug 2017 14:26:53 +1000 (EST)
> Subject:Re: [TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h
>
>  On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>  > Don't have much to add except to note that early FORTRANs had a
> version 
>  > of IF that took three statement numbers and did a (gasp) GOTO to
> the 
>  > first if the expression in the IF was negative, to the second if it
> was 
>  > 0, and to the third if it was positive.   And some mainframes had
> an 
>  > instruction that did exactly that as well...
>
>  Wasn't that the computed GOTO?
>
>  -- 
>  Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>