Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective

Dijkstra's famous letter with modern annotations and commentary

David R. Tribble Revision 1.1, 2005-11-27 Introduction Background Part I - Dijkstra's Letter, Annotated Part II - Structured Programming Part III - Is Goto Still Necessary? Conclusion - The Tao of Goto References Introduction This is a discussion and analysis of the letter sent to Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) in 1968 by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in which he calls for abolishing the goto statement in programming languages. The letter has become quite famous (or infamous, depending on your feelings about goto statements) in the 40 years since it was…

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