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.

    • wewbullEnglish
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      0
      ·
      5 months ago
      edit-2
      5 months ago
      link
      fedilink

      In most CPU instruction sets, the only conditional instruction is branch (aka goto).