The REAL Reason GOTO is Considered Harmful

by Joey deVilla on October 23, 2007

Man standing on a table in King Arthur’s court: “So then I typed GOTO 500″ — and here I am!
Comic taken from the book Thinking Forth.
Click the comic to see it in its original context.

(If you’re wondering why someone would GOTO a number, it’s likely that you’re too young to have worked with versions of BASIC that required line numbers. Consider yourself very, very, very lucky.)

Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Lee 10.23.07 at 3:50 pm

My gosh Joey…. now I really feel old!

2 Skitsanos 10.31.07 at 3:59 pm

BASIC is like one big love, starts as something crazy and never ends. GOTO 1.

3 Joel 10.31.07 at 7:02 pm

That’s funny. :-) I remember learning BASIC back in the mid 80s…

4 Anonymous 10.31.07 at 7:25 pm

Young? hmm… well, 10 years ago they were teaching basic with line numbers at my high school.

oh no… I’m old!

5 Cody 11.01.07 at 12:00 pm

I’m 20 now. When I was 10 or so I had a little v-tech play laptop that had basic. Sadly, v-tech has the feature no longer.

6 Rudy 11.01.07 at 6:20 pm

I learned BASIC in 1981!

I’m really feelin’ old!

7 rav 11.03.07 at 10:06 am

gud one.. lucky enough to use basic only for a short time.. :)

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post: The Language Adoption Debate and “Three Stooges Syndrome”

Next post: Google Translate’s Strange Results