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> "The issue I think is that people today read "GOTO Considered Harmful" without really understanding the world at the time. ... Just because it was a bad idea

> "The issue I think is that people today read "GOTO Considered Harmful" without really understanding the world at the time. ... Just because it was a bad idea to do everything with a GOTO 60 years ago shouldn't mean don't do some things with goto today." Every time this comes up, I always encourage people to read an excellent analysis by David Tribble "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" that goes over Dijkstra's essay line by line and explains what it means in a more modern context: http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html It really should be required reading in CS programs. I've used and still use goto in the few niches it makes sense to, primarily error handling and multi-level break in C/C++.

wglb 5y ago
This is a good balanced article. What is often missing from these goto discussions is the dialog between Knuth and Dijkstra on this topic. There is another discussion between the two of them about a problem requiring no less than four stacks to understand.
User23 5y ago
> "Dijkstra later abandoned the search for program provability and turned instead to the study of techniques for correct program derivation" It's odd how even today very few people in the "formal verification" world understand this distinction. Naturally verifying a derived program is trivial, since it's literally a proof by construction. I've attempted many times to explain this distinction, and they inevitably just start babbling about the limitations of the tooling they use. A sad case of man with a hammer syndrome and probably an illustration of my own failure to achieve clarity I guess. > "However, to some extent Dijkstra's principle has not been fully realized when we observe the complexity that must be dealt with by real-world programming tasks, such as multitasking, multithreading, interrupt handling" Dijkstra designed the first proven correct interrupt handler for a multitasking OS two years before the Goto Letter[1][2] so I think we can rest assured that he was aware of these issues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/EWD196.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/E...

wglb 5y ago

This is a good balanced article. What is often missing from these goto discussions is the dialog between Knuth and Dijkstra on this topic. There is another discussion between the two of them about a problem requiring no less than four stacks to understand.

User23 5y ago

> "Dijkstra later abandoned the search for program provability and turned instead to the study of techniques for correct program derivation" It's odd how even today very few people in the "formal verification" world understand this distinction. Naturally verifying a derived program is trivial, since it's literally a proof by construction. I've attempted many times to explain this distinction, and they inevitably just start babbling about the limitations of the tooling they use. A sad case of man with a hammer syndrome and probably an illustration of my own failure to achieve clarity I guess. > "However, to some extent Dijkstra's principle has not been fully realized when we observe the complexity that must be dealt with by real-world programming tasks, such as multitasking, multithreading, interrupt handling" Dijkstra designed the first proven correct interrupt handler for a multitasking OS two years before the Goto Letter[1][2] so I think we can rest assured that he was aware of these issues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/EWD196.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/E...