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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)
submitted 5 months ago by abbadon420@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev
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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.

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[-] Naich@lemmings.world 17 points 5 months ago

switch statements are three gotos in a trenchcoat.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 7 points 5 months ago

Anything is a goto in disguise when you think about it

[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

In most CPU instruction sets, the only conditional instruction is branch (aka goto).

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 0 points 5 months ago

And after each instruction, the CPU go to the next instruction

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 5 points 5 months ago

Duff's device takes this to a whole new level.

[-] abbadon420@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago

This is very nice and clean

[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 2 points 5 months ago

Egads! My eyes.

I'd rather it was just written in assembly. It's the do { opening a block under the case 0, but then proceeding to have further case statements inside that block. You now have case statements in two different scopes that are part of the same switch.

this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
104 points (97.3% liked)

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