每个人都知道Dijkstra的《致编辑的信》:goto语句被认为是有害的(这里。html transcript和这里。pdf),从那时起,就有一种强大的推动力,尽可能避免使用goto语句。虽然可以使用goto来生成不可维护的、庞大的代码,但它仍然存在于现代编程语言中。即使Scheme中先进的连续控制结构也可以被描述为复杂的后向。

在什么情况下需要使用goto?什么时候最好避免?

作为一个后续问题:C提供了一对函数setjmp()和longjmp(),它们不仅提供了在当前堆栈帧内进行跳转的能力,还提供了在任何调用帧内进行跳转的能力。这些应该被认为和goto一样危险吗?更危险?


Dijkstra自己也对这个头衔感到后悔,因为这不是他的责任。在EWD1308的结尾(也在这里。pdf),他写道:

Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

Donald E. Knuth写了一篇关于这个主题的经典论文,它与Dijkstra的论文相匹配,那就是结构化编程与语句。阅读既有助于重建上下文,也有助于对主题的非教条性理解。在本文中,Dijkstra对这个案例的观点被报道,并且更加强烈:

Donald E. Knuth:我相信通过呈现这样一个 事实上,我并不是不同意 Dijkstra的观点,因为 他最近写道: “请不要落入。 相信我是可怕的 教条的关于[去]的教条的 声明)。我觉得很不舒服 感觉别人在做 宗教出来了,好像 编程的概念问题 只用一个小技巧就能解决,用什么 一种简单的编码纪律!”


当前回答

我只记得用过一次goto。我有一系列五个嵌套计数循环,我需要能够根据某些条件从内部打破整个结构:

    for{
      for{
        for{
          for{
            for{
              if(stuff){
                GOTO ENDOFLOOPS;
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
    
    ENDOFLOOPS:

我可以很容易地声明一个布尔中断变量,并将其用作每个循环的条件的一部分,但在这种情况下,我认为GOTO是一样实用和一样可读的。

没有迅猛龙攻击我。

其他回答

原论文应该被认为是“无条件GOTO被认为是有害的”。它特别提倡一种基于条件(if)和迭代(while)结构的编程形式,而不是早期代码常见的测试-跳转。Goto在某些语言或环境中仍然有用,因为这些语言或环境不存在适当的控制结构。

在我看来,“goto有害”更多的是关于状态的封装和一致性。

许多代码,甚至是'oo'代码,都有像意大利面条代码一样糟糕的混乱状态封装。

“goto有害”的问题是,它让程序员只看机制规则而不理解这样的印象,即唯一可用的流控制应该是返回方法,这很容易导致通过引用传递许多状态——这又导致缺乏状态封装,而这正是“goto有害”试图摆脱的东西。

遵循典型的“OO”代码库中的控制流,并告诉我我们仍然没有意大利面条代码....(顺便说一下,我并不是指那些经常让人讨厌的“馄饨”代码——馄饨代码的执行路径通常是非常简单的,即使对象关系不是立即明显的)。

或者,换一种说法,避免gotos而将所有东西都作为子例程,只有在每个子例程只修改局部状态时才有用,只有通过该子例程(或至少该对象)才能修改局部状态。

我只需要它在基本(即。VB, VBScript等)和批处理文件。然后我只将它用于错误处理。在Basic中,我倾向于只使用“on error goto”。在批处理文件中,我必须使用它,因为没有其他命令。然后,我只使用它们作为向前跳转到有意义的标签。

被Jay Ballou添加的答案所吸引,我会加入0.02英镑。如果Bruno Ranschaert还没有这样做,我就会提到Knuth的“用GOTO语句进行结构化编程”的文章。

有一件事我没有看到讨论,那就是那种在Fortran教科书中教过的代码,尽管它并不常见。例如DO循环的扩展范围和开放代码子程序(记住,这将是Fortran II, Fortran IV或Fortran 66 -而不是Fortran 77或90)。至少有可能语法细节不准确,但概念应该足够准确。每种情况下的代码片段都在单个函数中。

请注意,由Kernighan和Plauger撰写的优秀但过时(并且绝版)的《编程风格的元素,第二版》中包含了一些来自那个时代(70年代末)编程教科书中滥用GOTO的现实例子。然而,下面的材料并不是来自那本书。

DO循环的扩展范围

       do 10 i = 1,30
           ...blah...
           ...blah...
           if (k.gt.4) goto 37
91         ...blah...
           ...blah...
10     continue
       ...blah...
       return
37     ...some computation...
       goto 91

One reason for such nonsense was the good old-fashioned punch-card. You might notice that the labels (nicely out of sequence because that was canonical style!) are in column 1 (actually, they had to be in columns 1-5) and the code is in columns 7-72 (column 6 was the continuation marker column). Columns 73-80 would be given a sequence number, and there were machines that would sort punch card decks into sequence number order. If you had your program on sequenced cards and needed to add a few cards (lines) into the middle of a loop, you'd have to repunch everything after those extra lines. However, if you replaced one card with the GOTO stuff, you could avoid resequencing all the cards - you just tucked the new cards at the end of the routine with new sequence numbers. Consider it to be the first attempt at 'green computing' - a saving of punch cards (or, more specifically, a saving of retyping labour - and a saving of consequential rekeying errors).

哦,你可能还注意到我在作弊,没有大喊大叫——Fortran IV通常都是大写的。

中非子例程

       ...blah...
       i = 1
       goto 76
123    ...blah...
       ...blah...
       i = 2
       goto 76
79     ...blah...
       ...blah...
       goto 54
       ...blah...
12     continue
       return
76     ...calculate something...
       ...blah...
       goto (123, 79) i
54     ...more calculation...
       goto 12

标签76和54之间的GOTO是计算GOTO的一个版本。如果变量i的值为1,则转到列表中的第一个标签(123);如果它的值是2,就转到秒,以此类推。从76到计算goto的片段是开放编码的子程序。它是一段执行起来很像子例程的代码,但写在函数体中。(Fortran也有语句函数——它们是嵌入在单行上的函数。)

还有比计算goto更糟糕的结构——你可以给变量赋标签,然后使用赋值的goto。google assigned goto告诉我它已经从Fortran 95中删除了。值得注意的是,结构化编程革命可以说是从Dijkstra的“GOTO被认为是有害的”信件或文章开始的。

如果不了解Fortran语言(以及其他语言,其中大多数已经半途而用了)中所做的事情,我们这些新手很难理解Dijkstra所处理的问题的范围。见鬼,直到那封信发表10年后,我才开始编程(但我确实不幸地在Fortran IV中编程了一段时间)。

Since I began doing a few things in the linux kernel, gotos don't bother me so much as they once did. At first I was sort of horrified to see they (kernel guys) added gotos into my code. I've since become accustomed to the use of gotos, in some limited contexts, and will now occasionally use them myself. Typically, it's a goto that jumps to the end of a function to do some kind of cleanup and bail out, rather than duplicating that same cleanup and bailout in several places in the function. And typically, it's not something large enough to hand off to another function -- e.g. freeing some locally (k)malloc'ed variables is a typical case.

I've written code that used setjmp/longjmp only once. It was in a MIDI drum sequencer program. Playback happened in a separate process from all user interaction, and the playback process used shared memory with the UI process to get the limited info it needed to do the playback. When the user wanted to stop playback, the playback process just did a longjmp "back to the beginning" to start over, rather than some complicated unwinding of wherever it happened to be executing when the user wanted it to stop. It worked great, was simple, and I never had any problems or bugs related to it in that instance.

Setjmp /longjmp有它们自己的位置——但那个位置是你不太可能只在很长一段时间内访问一次的地方。

编辑:我只是看了一下代码。实际上,我使用的是siglongjmp(),而不是longjmp(不是说这是一个大问题,但我已经忘记了siglongjmp的存在。)