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0 pointsvoidUpdate18d ago0 comments

like "goto considered harmful" when all assembly language depends on it

0 comments

In context though, it was trying to move standards forward.

Look at how acceptable C has changed over the years.

In ye old days it was acceptable to just read in any old text without checking bounds, now that is considered harmful.

There are still use cases for hairier parts of C, but that doesn't mean they should be used all the time. Same with goto.

jibal17d ago

It's bizarre that someone would think that it's dumb to say "goto considered harmful" because "all assembly language depends on it" ... Dunning-Kruger effect, anyone? People only write in assembler when it's strictly necessary for many good reasons, its lack of structure being one of them. When Dijkstra wrote that, FORTRAN--the major language for scientific programming in the U.S.--had no structured constructs ... `if` statements had a value and 3 numbered branch labels, for value < 0, value = 0, and value > 0. Dijkstra's paper resulted in an explosion of experiments in structured programming, and a huge improvement in programming languages and programmer tools.

Likewise out of context are the complaints about Dijkstra's statement about BASIC ... while it was hyperbole, it wasn't all that far off at the time, when BASIC variables were a single letter, all global, all statements were numbered, there was no structure, not even named functions.

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