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.
I’ve programmed C# for nearly 15 years, and have used
goto
twice . Once to simplify an early break from a nested loop, essentially a nestedcontinue
. The second was to refactor a giant switch statement in a parser, essentially removing convolutedwhile
loops, and just did agoto
the start.It’s one of those things that almost should never be used, but the times it’s been needed, it removed a lot of silliness.