Programming

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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] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Anything is a goto in disguise when you think about it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

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