Programming

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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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[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What...? That is a terrible idea.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 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.