Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful

By E. Dijkstra. 1968

Subfields: Program Analysis & Verification

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Program Analysis & Verification

1. David Balduzzi
2. Muhammad Ghifary
3. Michele Colledanchise
4. Petter Ögren

Citations in the corpus

• Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks (2016, background): “Code usingGOTOcan be perfectly correct, and RNNs with type mismatches can achieve outstanding performance.”
• A Survey of Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI (2020, background): “FSMs use state transitions, that transfer the control of the agent in a way that is very similar to the GOTO statement, that is now abolished in high level programming languages, [41].”
• Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction (2017, methodology): “The drawbacks of one-way control transfers were made explicit by Edsgar Dijkstra in his paper Goto statement considered harmful [15], where he states that “The Goto statement as it stands is just too primitive; it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one’s program”.”