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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)
submitted 2 years ago by 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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[–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

switch statements are three gotos in a trenchcoat.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anything is a goto in disguise when you think about it

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Duff's device takes this to a whole new level.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Egads! My eyes.

    I'd rather it was just written in assembly. It's the do { opening a block under the case 0, but then proceeding to have further case statements inside that block. You now have case statements in two different scopes that are part of the same switch.

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