GOTO is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It is a combination of the English words go and to. When executed it causes an unconditional transfer of control (a "jump") to another statement. The jumped-to statement is specified using some kind of label, which may be an identifier or a line number depending on the language. At the machine code level a goto is a form of branch or jump statement.
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GOTO is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It is a combination of the English words go and to. When executed it causes an unconditional transfer of control (a "jump") to another statement. The jumped-to statement is specified using some kind of label, which may be an identifier or a line number depending on the language. At the machine code level a goto is a form of branch or jump statement.
In some languages, goto functionality may be present without explicit use of the keyword goto, such as where a break or continue keyword may be followed by an identifier denoting a label. The SNOBOL programming language supports a form of statement suffix which causes an unconditional transfer of control after the statement has finished executing.
While GOTO statements are found in most high-level languages, there are a few high-level languages that do not support them. For instance, Java (where goto is a reserved word but does not presently serve any function).
Usage
The goto statement is often combined with the if statement to cause a conditional transfer of control.
Programming languages impose different restrictions with respect the jump location of a goto statement. For example, in the C programming language it is not allowed to jump to a label contained within another function. The setjmp/longjmp functions provide support for non-local gotos.
Criticism of goto usage
The GOTO statement has been the target of much continued criticism and debate, with the primary negative claim being that use of GOTO results in unreadable and generally unmaintainable "spaghetti code". As structured programming became more popular in the 1960s and 1970s, many computer scientists came to the conclusion that programs should always use so-called 'structured' flow-control commands such as loops and if-then-else statements in place of GOTO. Even today some programming style coding standards forbid the use of GOTO statements using similar rationales. In defense of GOTO statements, others have noted that the restrained use of GOTO does not necessarily lead to poor quality code, and also argue that there are some tasks that cannot be straightforwardly accomplished in many programming languages without the use of one or more GOTO statements, such as implementing finite state machines, breaking out of nested loops and exception handling.
Probably the most famous criticism of GOTO is a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra called Go To Statement Considered Harmful. In that letter Dijkstra argued that unrestricted GOTO statements should be abolished from higher-level languages because they complicated the task of analyzing and verifying the correctness of programs (particularly those involving loops). An alternative viewpoint is presented in Donald Knuth's Structured Programming with go to Statements which analyzes many common programming tasks and finds that in some of them GOTO is the optimal language construct to use.
