Talk:292: goto

Note that the concept of goto being harmful fortunately is weaning a little. Jumping forwards in code to the end where error handling is implemented is actually in wider use now; including many locations in the Linux kernel. Kaa-ching (talk) 09:53, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, goto has been used quite with some frequency in low-level code in C programming over the years, so it's not altogether surprising that it is used in the Linux kernel, or any other tight bit of code. Given the "advance" of programming languages, I wouldn't say that there's been any weaning, except off of the concept of an unstructured goto in more recent languages. Admittedly, there's a schism between the low-level (that is, near-to-assembly) coders who more readily use goto because in the end, that's what the compiler reduces code branching down to, and developers using higher-level languages (that is, more highly abstracted, more removed from 1 statement ~ 1 machine instruction languages) avoiding such because alternative structures abound, making goto somewhat unnecessary. There has been a bit of a dogmatic approach to teaching various languages, as in "thou shalt not use goto lest thou produce monsterous, unmaintainable code!" applied that many if not most developers observe; the humor in the panel is that this dogma is manifested in the appearance of a literal monster (a velociraptor, no less...) -- IronyChef (talk) 05:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

From an historical perspective, in the 80's, back when BASIC was the norm for developing proggies on home computers, because code blocks (begin...end, { ... }, etc.) were nonexistent, one had the option of two keywords: GOTO and GOSUB. In the case of branching beyond code that wasn't executed, many programmers abused GOTO even beyond the necessity of its use. This was a fairly hot topic in home-computing magazines at the time, again with BASIC in mind, and it appears that developers using C, [Turbo] Pascal and the like, having hangups about BASIC, emitted serious frowns at the idea of using GOTO at all. But for quick jumps that avoid having to tab forward entire blocks of code, GOTO (case notwithstanding) certainly has my support. Thokling (talk) 16:05, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

"Velociraptors are a running joke..." Ha, I get it 79.169.177.15 13:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)