- title: A Case Against the Goto Statement
- presenter: Edsger W. Dijkstra
- length: 30 minutes
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EdsgerWDijsktra
- Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/members/10646327/
For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to this discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so.