In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don’t have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don’t even have a goto statement anymore.
Forget about goto, the latest version of C# introduced what’s essentially comefrom.
To be fair,
awaitis a bit more likecomefrom, and it’s been around for a few releases now.async/await was introduced in version 4.5, released 2012. More than a few releases at this point!
How is
awaitlikecomefrom, any more than threading is likecomefrom? The variable context is preserved and you have no control over what is executed before theawaitreturns.What…? That is a terrible idea.
It’s scary as fuck, yeah, but, to be fair, it’s only intended to be used by code generators, and it’s quite awkward to use outside of them.