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.

  • eveninghere@beehaw.org
    19·
    6 months ago

    For C it makes sense. The point of C is that it can work as a low level language. Basically, everything doable with assembly SHOULD be doable with C, and that’s why we don’t need another low level language that’s basically C with goto.

    Even though almost all of C users should never use goto.

    • realharo
      14·
      6 months ago

      C is one of the few languages where using goto makes sense as a poor man’s local error/cleanup handler.