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Far as I could tell coming in on the end of it people like Dijkstra were primary trying to write proofs about programs. That motivated them to ban constructs t
by Gibbon1 4y ago
Far as I could tell coming in on the end of it people like Dijkstra were primary trying to write proofs about programs. That motivated them to ban constructs they didn't know how to analyze. Problem is that some of those things turned out to be trivially tractable but lots of people never got the memo.
- Jtsummers 4y agoIf you read Dijkstra's letter it wasn't about formal proofs. It was about go to statements being very hard to reason about, especially when trying to understand the flow of a program and how you got to a particular point in its execution. The word "proof" doesn't even show up in the letter. It's only a page or so, well worth a read instead of guessing at what he may have been writing about. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...