Background

• Programming languges in the 1950's and 60's made heavy use of the GOTO to modify control flow.
• In the 1970's there was a general recognition that GOTOs made code harder to understand, analyze and maintain.
• Structured programming used constructs like while and for were thought to be much better.

Warning

• Don't use C's goto or label in CMSC201
• Don't use them unless you (i) have become an expert programmer and (ii) can justify why they are needed or better than doing it another way.
• We show this to you out of a desire for completeness.
• Don't use the goto in C.

See also

Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to this discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so.

The break statement

The continue statement

Since both break and continue alter the natural control flow of a program, we don't allow you to use them in your loops in CMSC 201. The notable exception is that most cases of the switch should have a break statement in them.