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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?
They told me never to use GoTo statements in my Fortran class at Lehigh. Lying bastards!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I'd always been told that use of Goto led to a case of the BLAS in my code!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Ever get the feeling someone wrote an article merely for the pun?
Good thing the headline didn't contribute to that at all.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Although he also writes fast code, Mr. Bluescreen was criticised for the poor stability of his code.
It was CIS 150, C++ was the language of the day (pascal before, java after.) I was taking an exam that was all coding. I remember extensive use of GOTO from my commodore days, so I used one in a test (the objective was to code something with as few lines as possible)
;)
I had the shortest working code in the class but the arse hole teacher failed me for it. Said something like "we don't teach goto for a reason. Yeah, it's in the book, but don't ever use it!"
Jerk. I should post his phone number on slashdot
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
...To see who actually reads the article.
;)
Judging from the replies...not many people
Seriously, though, how does a guy end up with a name like this in computer programming? It sounds made-up! Then again, I've heard some very, very odd names...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Goto Considered Helpful?
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
This guy is clearly considered harmful.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
10 Print "oh Mr. K. GOTO" 20 I=I+1 30 If I 5 Print "Domo" Else 50 40 GOTO 20 50 Print "I'm Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy!"
I believe you are referring to Kazushige's cousin, Mr. Gosub.
He is your goto-guy :)
Hey kids! Your uncle Sammy here, with a fun rainy-day Slashdot activity for you!
First: take an article which revolves around a pun, just like this one, to deliver a message which has a different meaning than the headline would suggest.
Next: Pick a comment-karma threshold. Two or three ought to do it!
Last: Count how many of the people at that level have completely missed the point of the article: specifically, that the "Goto" in the writeup is not a GOTO statement, but rather the name of a programmer named Kazushige Goto; that this particular distinction is supposed to be considered a bit of ironic humor; and, that this is, in fact, the reason that Hemos posted it "from the we're-punny-this-morning dept."
Hours of fun for everyone!
0 END
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
10 Goto FirstPost
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
From the article:
"Robert A. van de Geijin, a computer scientist who works with Mr. Goto at the Texas Center,..."
All right, a Japanese programmer named Goto, working with a non-Japanese guy name Geijin. That's too much.
Oh, Goat-toe hell you spoilsport!
After all, it was Donald Knuth himself who, in "Structured Programming with goto Statements" (Computing Surveys, sometime in 1974), wrote "At the [year] IFIPS Conference, I was introduced to Dr. Eiichi Goto, who cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."
(Apologies for errors, as my issues of CS are in storage and I'm doing this from memory.)
My favorite ever comment was, "If I ever saw this in the real world, I'd fire you" attached to an "A" test paper with a programming question on it I'd managed to reduce to one line of nearly incomprehensible recursion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If wife has headache, GOTO sleep
If boss is on vacation, GOTO strip bar for long lunch
If in-laws are coming over, GOTO work and pretend there is a critical problem that requires your presence all night
If technical conference is in Vegas, GOTO it
loads of examples.
If work is boring, GOTO slashdot to kill an hour or two
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
"the correct pronunciation of my name is more like "goat-toe.""
Is that anything like camel toe?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
In CS courses below 300, we were told that goto was evil and should NEVER be used. They didn't even teach its use. In 300+ courses, we were given examples of why goto is sometimes the best approach producing easier to understand code that was also faster. In fact, a lot of time was spent by professors that did real work deprogramming brainwashed students who were taught that global variables should never EVER be used, goto is Satan, dynamic memory is for terrorists and all kinds of god awful ideas.
That is one of the problems with academia. There are too many Java hugging professors teaching the C/C++ courses and trying to push their own agenda. A Java loving professor completely deprived his students of an entire semester of C++ file/data structure instruction because of his Java pimping agenda. When the term project of "File and Data Structures in C and C++" is a Java project, you know there's a problem...
> What kind of dumbass, shitbox, stupid programmer are you?
Oh dear. That's the worst code I've seen for ages.
Why free bar in the case that its attempt to allocate memory fails? Shouldn't you instead be freeing foo?
Likewise for the attempt to malloc baz, where you attempt to free baz instead of both bar and foo.
> Excuse my extremely sloppy writing, I'm rushing, and don't have time to proof
> read & restructure.
Not only that, your code is terrible, and your quoted justification for using goto "in every 10 lines of code" shows that you shouldn't be let anywhere near a compiler.
And after all that, you manage to find it within yourself to abuse someone who clearly knows more about the subject than yourself! Do you perhaps have a very small penis?
Wait until you read in an interview about Mr. Kazushige Goto's favorite food.
Italian.
Pasta.
Specially Spaghetti.
[/me ducks and runs away....]
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This always reminds of how "Label not found" was translated as "Volumenaam niet gevonden" in the Dutch version of MS-DOS.
.BAT file uses GOTO and specifies a nonexistent label, the translation to "volume name" is completely incorrect. .BAT file, it took me quite some time before I understood what was happening.
The translator apparently had seen the DIR output "Volume in drive A: has no label" and believed that the "label" is referring to a "volume label" and translated it as "volumenaam" ("volume name").
But when a
When I first got this errormessage running a