[Gluster-devel] An interesting take on GoTo statement by Dijkstra -

[Vijay Bellur]

On 01/15/2015 12:13 PM, Nagaprasad Sathyanarayana wrote:
> In a quest to find why good programmers are wary of the "Go To"
> statement, came across this interesting article by /Edsger W. Dijkstra/ .
>
> http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html.
>

goto statements that cause one to go back & forth across the code are 
annoying to me. However, if goto statements are used to return control 
from a common point within a function, they enhance readability and also 
help in ensuring that we perform necessary cleanup/terminal actions for 
a function in a single place.

It is to be noted that Dijkstra's article appeared before C was 
invented. If you are interested in understanding more about goto, 
Knuth's paper titled Structured Programming with go to statements [1] 
and a lkml thread on the same [2] can be helpful.

Cheers,
Vijay

[1] 
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356640&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=472165232&CFTOKEN=27447667 
(needs access to ACM)

[2] 
http://koblents.com/Ches/Links/Month-Mar-2013/20-Using-Goto-in-Linux-Kernel-Code/