Go To Statement Considered Harmful?

Question

If the statement above is correct, then why when I use reflector on .Net BCL I see it is used a lot?

EDIT: let me rephrase: are all the GO-TO's I see in reflector written by humans or compilers?

Answer 1

I think the following excerpt from the Wikipedia Article on Goto is particularly relevant here:

Probably the most famous criticism of GOTO is a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra called Go To Statement Considered Harmful. In that letter Dijkstra argued that unrestricted GOTO statements should be abolished from higher-level languages because they complicated the task of analyzing and verifying the correctness of programs (particularly those involving loops). An alternative viewpoint is presented in Donald Knuth's Structured Programming with go to Statements which analyzes many common programming tasks and finds that in some of them GOTO is the optimal language construct to use.

So, on the one hand we have Edsger Dijkstra (a incredibly talented computer scientist) arguing against the use of the GOTO statement, and specifically arguing against the excessive use of the GOTO statement on the grounds that it is a much less structured way of writing code.

On the other hand, we have Donald Knuth (another incredibly talented computer scientist) arguing that using GOTO, especially using it judiciously can actually be the "best" and most optimal construct for a given piece of program code.

Ultimately, IMHO, I believe both men are correct. Dijkstra is correct in that overuse of the GOTO statement certainly makes a piece of code less readable and less structured, and this is certainly true when viewing computer programming from a purely theoretical perspective.

However, Knuth is also correct as, in the "real world", where one must take a pragmatic approach, the GOTO statement when used wisely can indeed be the best choice of language construct to use.