Go To Statement Considered Harmful

Go To Statement Considered Harmful is the name of a letter by Edsger Dijkstra published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM (CACM), in which he criticized the excessive use of the GOTO statement in programming languages of the day, and advocated structured programming instead.

History

The original title of the letter, as submitted to CACM, was A Case Against the Goto Statement, but CACM editor Niklaus Wirth changed the title to Go To Statement Considered Harmful.

Frank Rubin published a criticism of Dijkstra's letter in the March 1987 CACM where it appeared under the title 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.

The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?.

Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence.

The phrase considered harmful has since appeared in numerous critical essays in computer science and related disciplines.

Journalistic cliché

According to linguist Mark Liberman, considered harmful was a journalistic cliché, used in headlines, well before the Dijkstra article. He cites the headline over a letter published August 12, 1949 in The New York Times: "Rent Control Controversy / Enacting Now of Hasty Legislation Considered Harmful".

See also

• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
• Goto
• Imperative programming
• Software engineering
• Spaghetti code
• Statement (computer science)
• Structured programming

External links

• Considered harmful @ Wikipedia