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.
TIL that C# and Java have a goto statement.
Forget about goto, the latest version of C# introduced what’s essentially comefrom.
To be fair,
awaitis a bit more likecomefrom, and it’s been around for a few releases now.async/await was introduced in version 4.5, released 2012. More than a few releases at this point!
Java doesn’t. Well, it’s a reserved keyword but it’s not implemented.
Yeah but we got labels with continue and break, so we can pseudo goto.
Following that logic
if,elseandwhileare 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”.
If pretty much gets compiled to a goto statement. Well more a jumpif but same principle