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

submitted 6 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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[–] Kissaki 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Their main argumentation (from page 1) summarized:

You know the state and progress of a program from the line you are on. A goto breaks that.

You can index the progress of a program through static line indexes and a dynamic loop index and function call stack. A goto breaks that. Including a "statements/lines since beginning of execution" is infeasible for understanding.