Goto considered harmful
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This is because, simply put, goto statements make the behaviour of a program harder to understand. To quote Dijkstra "...the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce." The harder a program is the understand, the harder it is to maintain. | This is because, simply put, goto statements make the behaviour of a program harder to understand. To quote Dijkstra "...the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce." The harder a program is the understand, the harder it is to maintain. | ||
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| + | The excessive use of goto statements can use to very convoluted code with a complicated flow of control. Such code is sometimes called [[Spaghetti code]] | ||
== See also == | == See also == | ||
* [[Design maxims]] | * [[Design maxims]] | ||
| + | * [[Spaghetti code]] | ||
Revision as of 03:56, 20 July 2009
This is not particularly relevant to higher level languages such as Java which do not have goto statements (note that in Java "goto" is a reserved keyword but is not used), but in low level languages such as Fortran goto statements are considered bad practice.
This is because, simply put, goto statements make the behaviour of a program harder to understand. To quote Dijkstra "...the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce." The harder a program is the understand, the harder it is to maintain.
The excessive use of goto statements can use to very convoluted code with a complicated flow of control. Such code is sometimes called Spaghetti code
