The year was 1973. Real programmers were still using punch-cards and Pascal. C had barely been invented, and object-oriented programming was hardly a twinkle even in the eyes of top computer scientists. Whether or not to use goto was the hot topic of the day.

Knuth

It was then that Donald Knuth wrote his famous essay Structured Programming with go to Statements. And some essay it is: he covers everything from the current trends on structured programming to premature optimization being the root of all evil. (I read it in Literate Programming, but it’s also available as a scanned PDF here.)

He’s responding to Edsger Dijkstra’s well-known letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful, but (in typical Knuth fashion) he covers so much related ground it’s not funny.

What was striking to me is the context of his discussion. It’s clear that structured programming — which we use every day and think is “common sense” — had to be invented, discussed, and refined. Like most inventions, it’s obvious … 36 years later.

goto

It’s also obvious that goto (or “go to” as Knuth calls it) was much more widely used and abused than it is today. This is probably partly because assembly language was so much more common, but also because “they” had to learn that goto isn’t usually the right abstraction — in fact, it isn’t much of an abstraction at all.

Now it’s 2009, and goto is pretty rare. It’s still used, of course, but I’ve usually seen it only in the cases Knuth is talking about: for efficiency, error exits, and for breaking out of certain kinds of loops.

In C you still occassionally need it for cleaning up before error exits, or for breaking out of efficient nested loops, or in generated code, but these days we also have other constructs and other languages that solve 1973’s problems most of the time.

In C, you have the invaluable break as well as the ability to return early. Knuth advocated the equivalent of C’s break , implying also that most languages at the time didn’t have it.

Compilers are also somewhat better at producing optimized code from non- goto ed source: for example, I can program my virtual machine’s opcode dispatcher as a bunch of case statements, knowing the compiler will probably optimize it into a jump table.

And in most modern high-level languages (C++ and up) you have exceptions, which eliminate the need for error-exit goto s, as well as solve several other problems in a really tidy way.

Python

Python is important in this discussion not only because Knuth is keen on beautiful code, but because Knuth “predicted” its arrival in several different ways. Here’s a quote from the last section of his essay:

It seems clear that languages somewhat different from those in existence today would enhance the preparation of structured programs. We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language.

Of course, many languages now have “small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones”, but Python really took Knuth seriously about using indentation as a delimiter.

What’s more, you can always add goto to Python if you really need it. :-)

OOP

And it gets even more interesting when he goes on to say:

Although our examples don’t indicate this, it turns out that a given level of abstraction often involves several related routines and data definitions; for example, when we decide to represent a table in a certain way, we simultaneously want to specify the routines for storing and fetching information from that table. The next generation of languages will probably take into account such related routines.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that sound awfully like OOP? So in a single essay apparently about goto statements, Knuth predicted modules, Python’s use of indentation as delimiters, and object-oriented programming. :-)

9 April 2009 by Ben 9 comments

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