104
[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
58 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] asyncrosaurus@programming.dev 5 points 5 months ago

I've programmed C# for nearly 15 years, and have used goto twice . Once to simplify an early break from a nested loop, essentially a nested continue. The second was to refactor a giant switch statement in a parser, essentially removing convoluted while loops, and just did a goto the start.

It's one of those things that almost should never be used, but the times it's been needed, it removed a lot of silliness.

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

Programming

17314 readers
141 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz