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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/[email protected]

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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] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

TIL that C# and Java have a goto statement.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Forget about goto, the latest version of C# introduced what's essentially comefrom.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Please don't link to medium articles. That page is terrible to visit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Looks fine on Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin. 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm running exactly the same and it doesn't look fine on my end.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Huh. Maybe it's NoScript, then.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Could be. I'm getting forced to make an account and such. That's why I hate medium.

[–] airbreather 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

To be fair, await is a bit more like comefrom, and it's been around for a few releases now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

async/await was introduced in version 4.5, released 2012. More than a few releases at this point!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

How is await like comefrom, any more than threading is like comefrom? The variable context is preserved and you have no control over what is executed before the await returns.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What...? That is a terrible idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

It's scary as fuck, yeah, but, to be fair, it's only intended to be used by code generators, and it's quite awkward to use outside of them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Java doesn't. Well, it's a reserved keyword but it's not implemented.

[–] Carighan 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but we got labels with continue and break, so we can pseudo goto.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Following that logic if, else and while are also "pseudo goto" statements.

There's nothing wrong with conditional jumps - we couldn't program without them. The problem with goto specifically is that you can goto "anywhere".

[–] lmaydev 1 points 4 months ago

If pretty much gets compiled to a goto statement. Well more a jumpif but same principle