Empirical Study On How C Devs Use Goto In Practice Says "Not Harmful"

Edsger Dijkstra famously opined in 1968 on the danger of Goto statements. New submitter Mei Nagappan writes with a mellower view, nearly 50 years later: By qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing a statistically valid random sample from almost 2 million C files and 11K+ projects, we find that developers limit themselves to using goto appropriately in most cases, and not in an unrestricted manner like Dijkstra feared, thus suggesting that goto does not appear to be harmful in practice. (Here's the preprint linked from above abstract.)

Comments

I prefer the Comefrom statement

[Anonymous Coward]

It gives me so much more flexibility and power. The computed comfrom is even better.

XKCD

[rhazz]

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/292/

Limited sample :)

[davidwr]

I bet the "valid random sample" didn't include any projects from the Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Re:GOTO is a crutch for bad programmers

[DamonHD]

Some sort of nested do { ... } while(false); and break; would be my first suggestion.

Rgds

Damon

longjmp()

[stox]

is far more entertaining than a mere goto.