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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 (15 children)

TIL that C# and Java have a goto statement.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (10 children)

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

[–] 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.

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