[TUHS] I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary

[Clem Cole]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 9:16 AM Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Multilevel breaks are as bad as goto with regard to structure violation.
>
Amen.  My memory of the argument at the time was one of pick your poison.
Each language has trade-offs and it depends on what you value. C was
considered "dirty" by many CS types in the day compared to languages like
Pascal, Simula67, Algol-X.

I've always said the key was what was left out of the language, not what
was put in. Dennis offers a few important pieces of wisdom here:

   - "When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I
   often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice
   of a worldwide crowd."
   - "A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
   in than some that do."
   - "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."


Arnold's observation about trying to be small is reasonable,
although contemporaries like BLISS did have support. So the comparison
should really be to BCPL, PL/360, BLISS, *et al*. for features/size
[although Wulf cheated, the BLISS-11 compiler was not self-hosting and
needed a PDP-10 to run it].


ᐧ
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