[huhtenberg]

The interpretation of Dijkstra's sentiment in your blog post is plain wrong.

His paper [1] clearly talks about goto semantics that are still present in modern languages and not just unrestricted jmp instructions (that may take you from one function into the middle of another or some such). I'd urge everyone to give it a skim, it's very short and on point.

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...

[jerf]

Well, there you get that I don't believe in letting certain people own ideas and then stick to them as if they were given revelation from on high about how things should work. The distinctive thing about goto that breaks structured programming, to the point that functions as we think of them today can't even exist in such an environment, is the ability to jump arbitrarily.

I'm way less worried about uses of goto that are rigidly confined within some structured programming scope. As long as they stay confined to specific functions, they are literally orders of magnitude less consequential than the arbitrary goto, and being an engineer rather than an academic, I take note of such things.

I don't ask Alan Kay about the exact right way to do OO, I don't ask Fielding about the exact right way to do REST interfaces, and I don't necessarily sit here and worry about every last detail of what Dijkstra felt about structured programming. He may be smarter than me, but I've written a lot more code in structured paradigms than he ever did. (This is not a special claim to me; you almost certainly have too. You should not ignore your own experiences.)