Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful | Communications of the ACM
dl.acm.org

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.

  • stepanEnglish
    210·
    5 months ago

    TIL that C# and Java have a goto statement.

      • NaoPbEnglish
        80·
        5 months ago

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

        • leftzero
          20·
          5 months ago

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

          • NaoPbEnglish
            10·
            5 months ago

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

            • leftzero
              10·
              5 months ago

              Huh. Maybe it’s NoScript, then.

              • NaoPbEnglish
                20·
                5 months ago

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

      • AirBreather
        40·
        5 months ago

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

        • asyncrosaurus
          30·
          5 months ago

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

        • BatmanAoD
          10·
          5 months ago5 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.

        • leftzero
          10·
          5 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.

    • atzanteolEnglish
      40·
      5 months ago5 months ago

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

      • Carighan Maconar
        10·
        5 months ago

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

        • atzanteolEnglish
          10·
          5 months ago

          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
            10·
            3 months ago

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

    • TehPersEnglish
      30·
      5 months ago5 months ago

      In C# at least, goto can take you between case labels in a switch statement (rather than using fallthrough), which I don’t view as being nearly as bad. For example, you can do goto case 1 or goto default to jump to another case.

      The only other use of goto I find remotely tolerable is when paired with a labelled loop statement (like putting a label right before a for loop), but honestly Rust handles that far better with labelled loops (and labelled block expressions).

      • asyncrosaurus
        50·
        5 months ago

        I’ve programmed C# for nearly 15 years, and have used goto twice . Once to simplify an early break from a nested loop, essentially a nested continue. The second was to refactor a giant switch statement in a parser, essentially removing convoluted while loops, and just did a goto the start.

        It’s one of those things that almost should never be used, but the times it’s been needed, it removed a lot of silliness.