Programming

17313 readers

302 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

101

[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]

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] Carighan 1 points 6 months ago (2 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