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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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[-] realharo@lemm.ee 14 points 5 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 1 points 5 months ago

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

[-] pkill@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago

Still don't get why Go simultaneously picked this and introduced defer

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

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