Perhaps you’re talking about non-local GOTOs in Algol68, where you can jump from a nested procedure to a label in a lexically enclosing procedure. Pascal has this too. C has no nested procedures but its setjmp/longjmp is much more powerful (& dangerous). Though both can be used to the top level of a REPL or to jump to a known place after an error.
On Mar 12, 2023, at 11:24 AM, Steve <srb@unixsh.com> wrote:
Dennis added setjmp() and
longjmp() so the shell could handle errors in a reasonable way.
There are two places where setjmp was used in the original shell
(7th edition) code as I recall. Both at the top level
in main.c.
The idea came from Algol68 but I do not know where it was
originally invented. longjmp() was used in the "exitsh"
function that got called on the exit command, default trap routine
and a fault with no trap set.
It was also used when executing a subshell to avoid a fork and
exec. In this case the setjmp() was at top level
in the initial sh setup.
Hope this makes sense. But these were two different uses. One
for error recovery and one to reset the execution environment
back to initial state.
Steve