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Goto Leads to Faster Code
pdoubleya writes "There's an article over at the NY Times (registration required) about Kazushige Goto, the author of the Goto Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS, see the wiki); his BLAS implementation is used by 4 of the current 11 fastest computers in the world. Goto is known for painstaking effort in hand-optimizing his routines; in one case, "when computer scientists at the University at Buffalo added Goto BLAS to their Pentium-based supercomputer, the calculating power of the system jumped from 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion mathematical operations per second out of a theoretical limit of 3 trillion." To quote Jack Dongarra, from the University of Tennessee, "I tell them that if they want the fastest they should still turn to Mr. Goto."" Ever get the feeling someone wrote an article merely for the pun?
Read TFA and dig a bit, then you will see...
>>Actually, GOTO is my last name and does not mean "go to." (Nor is it pronounced "go to"; the correct pronunciation of my name is more like "goat-toe.")
Good God! How many of you slashbot jerks even bother to sniff the article before launching into a tirade about structured programming etc.
Dumb asses, the bunch of you!
Please moderate the parent of this post and all others who hurried to post comments on the "GO TO" statement (-1, Redundant). These suckers who don't even read the summary in the scramble to get the first post should be reduced to the status of posting at -1. Thanks.
Look, I usually try not to lose my cool on this, but 90% of the comments here indicate that people think the key to this performance increase is the use of gotos in code. No, you fucking idiots. "Goto", in this case, is Goto-san, a Japanese person (pronounced "Goh-toh" with long o's, not "goh-tu"). The use of gotos in human-written (and read) code is always bad and nowhere is that actually suggested. Do any of you nitwits even understand what a pun is?
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