Now, out of college and with more free time to ponder such things, I have come to a conclusion for the reason she disliked this so called C style of coding. When using a switch or continue, or in a lesser case, the conditional statement, you are basically issuing a goto command, which can easily go awry. The goto command is fairly controversial in that it can be misused easily, and can almost always be avoided by other means.

For instance, I mentioned above my use of the continue statement, which causes a loop to stop executing and return to the beginning of the block to start again. This behavior could have been achieved using an if statement, but I thought continue was a more elegant solution. This could be argued either way. Yes, the if statement works, but it also adds another layer of braces, which I felt unnecessarily cluttered my code.

The conditional statement ( condition ? if_true : if_false ) is the only supposed C style code that is not a goto statement masquerading as a useful function. As to my professor's aversion to my using it, I have come to the conclusion that she was concerned about the difference between if /statements/ and if /expressions/. The difference between the statement and the expression is simply that the expression returns a value, which is what gives it purpose.

Is C style programming a bad habit that needs to be stamped out of C++ programs? That depends on who you ask. I know that when I am coding, I use what I feel is a healthy balance of coding styles, only breaking from common conventions when I feel it is necessary to make my code simpler to read and execute. If I were to be honest with myself though, this happens much less often than I care to admit.