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.

  • realharo
    140·
    5 months ago

    C is one of the few languages where using goto makes sense as a poor man’s local error/cleanup handler.

    • 42yeah
      10·
      5 months ago

      Yeah. Without a proper error handling mechanism, goto is actually useful for once.

      • anti-idpol action
        10·
        5 months ago

        Still don’t get why Go simultaneously picked this and introduced defer