"Religion is not harmless" is not harmless

[bananas]

cf. '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

In computer science and related disciplines, considered harmful is a phrase popularly used in the titles of diatribes and other critical essays (there are at least 65 such works<1>). It was popularized by Edsger Dijkstra's letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful,<2> published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM (CACM), in which he criticized the excessive use of the GOTO statement in programming languages of the day and advocated structured programming instead.<3> The original title of the letter, as submitted to CACM, was A Case Against the Goto Statement, but CACM editor Niklaus Wirth changed the title to the now immortalized Go To Statement Considered Harmful.<4>

Frank Rubin published a criticism of Dijkstra's letter in the March 1987 CACM where it appeared under the title 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful<5>. The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?<6>. Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a somewhat disappointing correspondence.<7>

<snip>

[Silent3]

1. Care to show how you'd analogize...

...religion in general and the semi-religious goto issue, or is that just an exercise left for the reader?

I do most of my programming in Java, so even if I wanted to use a goto, I couldn't. Try/catch, break label, and continue label, however, pretty much get you most of the functionality of having a goto, but without as much potential for abuse.

The world of software development is full of semi-religious issues, even about things like where to type spaces, indentation styles, placement of braces, etc. The problem is that the whole world doesn't understand that my preferences on those various subjects are the correct ones. :)

[Jim__]

2. Thanks for posting that.

I'd never read either Dijkstra's or Rubin's letter before. Dijkstra's letter is academic and abstract, and I found Rubin's letter much more convincing. But, then, I agreed with Rubin before reading the letters.

[HamdenRice]

3. But why was "GOTO" harmful?

I looked it up, and gosh the language and commands mentioned in that article brought back memories of being a kid, programming the high school's IBM 1620, and a local university's IBM 360 in Fortran IV with Watfor.

I confess I used goto a lot. Was I sinning?

[Silent3]

4. In some earlier languages you couldn't avoid GOTO.

I haven't looked at FORTRAN much since the 70s. Perhaps current versions of FORTRAN have control structures which would allow you to avoid or eliminate GOTO statements, but as I recall, in the versions of FORTRAN is used back in high school, you couldn't do much, if any, conditional logic in FORTRAN without GOTOs. The same was true for early versions of BASIC.

It's been a long, long time since I last coded a GOTO. I'm not against judicious occasional use, however, and there's no sense condemning GOTOs used in a language that doesn't offer you much other choice.

The reason for condemning GOTOs is that they can make program logic very difficult to follow, hard to read, and easy to break, leading to "spaghetti code".