Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> This is interesting. Do you have any references we can read about this
> assertion -- specifically, that "GOTO" was not well loved (I assume
> "by the programming community at large") even by around 1966?
Dijkstra's famous 1968 "GOTO considered harmful" letter
(http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/) quotes a 1966 article by N. Wirth
and C.A.R. Hoare:
The remark about the undesirability of the go to statement is far from
new. I remember having read the explicit recommendation to restrict
the use of the go to statement to alarm exits, but I have not been
able to trace it; presumably, it has been made by C. A. R. Hoare. In
[1, Sec. 3.2.1.] Wirth and Hoare together make a remark in the same
direction in motivating the case construction: "Like the conditional,
it mirrors the dynamic structure of a program more clearly than go to
statements and switches, and it eliminates the need for introducing a
large number of labels in the program."
Reference: 1. Wirth, Niklaus, and Hoare C. A. R. A contribution
to the development of ALGOL. Comm. ACM 9 (June 1966), 413-432.
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