Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful | Communications of the ACM
dl.acm.org

In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don’t have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don’t even have a goto statement anymore.

  • realharo@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 months ago

    C is one of the few languages where using goto makes sense as a poor man’s local error/cleanup handler.

    • 42yeah@lemm.ee
      0·
      6 months ago

      Yeah. Without a proper error handling mechanism, goto is actually useful for once.