Goto [Was Re: Chown ???]

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 18:44:26 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 10:32 -0500, Dave Ihnat wrote:
> The purpose of deprecating use of goto was to avoid the spaghetti code
> that was so prevalent, especially in C.

<Bzzzt>. Close but no cigar. The problems with Goto were pointed out by
Dijkstra in his famous 1968 letter to CACM "Go To Statement Considered
Harmful", which is several years before C appeared on the scene. (Note
also Knuth's 1974 rebuttal to Dijkstra "Structured Programming with Goto
Statements"; old controversies never die, they just fade away).

C programmers are not notable users of goto's in my experience. In fact
the use of goto is pretty unusual (unless you consider break and
continue to be disguised goto's).

Don't worry, you can still write illegible code without using any
goto's.

poc




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