2 Dec
2020
2 Dec
'20
5:44 a.m.
On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 3:40 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
Along those lines, it's always been interesting to me the way that
Dijkstra's statement about goto must have
influenced language design. The
original "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful" note was quite damning, but I
wonder if it meant to be: it strikes me that the really dangerous thing
about "goto" isn't its mere existence or even its use, but rather,
it's
unconstrained use when better alternatives exist in the language. As one
can observe in well-written C code, judicious use of `goto` can be quite
elegant in comparison to the alternative.
D-1stra originally sent "Go to [...]" to CACM as a paper entitled "A Case
Against The Go To Statement". But the editor, who was Niklaus Wirth,
thought it important to publish it quickly, so he turned it into a letter
to the editor and retitled it.