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| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 4:47:41 am | by StuartYeates | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Monday, December 1, 2003 10:31:30 pm | by CraigBox | Revert |
@@ -5,9 +5,9 @@
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Originally found at [http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/].
-''Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. Copyright © 1968, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted work. It is not guaranteed to be an accurate copy of the author's original work.''
+''Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. Copyright © 1968, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. This is a digitized copy derived from an [
ACM]
copyrighted work. It is not guaranteed to be an accurate copy of the author's original work.''
----
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 GoTo statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the GoTo statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the GoTo statement should be abolished from all "higher level" [ProgrammingLanguage]s (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.
@@ -38,8 +38,8 @@
In [2] Guiseppe Jacopini seems to have proved the (logical) superfluousness of the GoTo statement. The exercise to translate an arbitrary flow diagram more or less mechanically into a jump-less one, however, is not to be recommended. Then the resulting flow diagram cannot be expected to be more transparent than the original one.
References:
-[1] NicolasWirth and CharlesAntonyRichardHoare. A contribution to the development of [Algol]. Comm. ACM 9 (June 1966), 413-432.
+[1] NicolasWirth and CharlesAntonyRichardHoare. A contribution to the development of [Algol]. Comm. [
ACM]
9 (June 1966), 413-432.
[2] Corrado Böhm and Jacopini Guiseppe. Flow diagrams, Turing machines and languages with only two formation rules. Comm. ACM 9 (May 1966), 366-371.
-EdsgerWybeDijkstra %%% Technological University %%% Eindhoven, The Netherlands
+EdsgerWybeDijkstra %%% Technological [
University]
%%% Eindhoven, The Netherlands
