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This post happens to describe the world of the famous “Goto considered harmful” paper.

Most people just know the title and simply fetishistically refuse to use a goto (most of the time they are terrible, but not always). But really the paper argues for giving subroutines a single entry point.

Sometimes I write assembly code that falls through into another subroutine, but I don’t want all my assembly to be spaghetti like that.



While those are of the same era, the goto issue was its own whole issue, generally referring to goto statements in a give block of code, and not talking about subroutines.

While this, as you note, often led to mass refusal to use a goto, the effect of the paper led to much discussion and presaged the practice of much better control flow constructs in languages.




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