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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)

submitted 5 months ago by abbadon420@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 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@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

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