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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

In C# at least, goto can take you between case labels in a switch statement (rather than using fallthrough), which I don't view as being nearly as bad. For example, you can do goto case 1 or goto default to jump to another case.

The only other use of goto I find remotely tolerable is when paired with a labelled loop statement (like putting a label right before a for loop), but honestly Rust handles that far better with labelled loops (and labelled block expressions).

[–] asyncrosaurus 5 points 7 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.