Class 04: Goto Considered Harmful

Held: Monday, January 29, 2007

Summary: Today we consider the basics of structured programming and the reasons it supplanted goto-ridden programming.

Related Pages:

• EBoard.
• Reading: Edsger W. Dijkstra - Goto Considered Harmful and P. Bratley - Algorithm 306: Permutation with Repetitions.

Notes:

• Thursday at noon: Summer research opportunities.
• Questions on HW2?
• Friday's reading is the same as Wednesday's, so no readings distributed today.

Overview:

• Context.
• Dijkstra's Famous Letter.
• Permutation with Repetitions.

The Context of GTSCH

Some of these notes come from Dijkstra's What Led to Notes on Structured Programming (EWD1308). Available at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1308.html.

• Preparation: What did you learn about context from The Story of Mel?

• Late 1960's; about a decade after the first major high-level programming languages.
• Why did languages include go to statements?
  • Part of the underlying Von Neumann architecture.
  • At least initially, seemed like the obvious control structure. (Non-recursive procedure call also available.)
• If control was based on go to statements, why were these languages closer to the problem?
  • Programmers didn't have to lay out memory for values and variables.
  • Programmers didn't have to decompose formulae into individual operations.
  • Programmers didn't have to worry about temporaries in such decompositions.
  • Mnemonics for many key operations.
  • Programmers didn't have to worry about data representation.
  • ...
• But people were seeing problems writing larger programs
  • As the previous reading tells us, many proto-software-engineers wanted more abstraction
  • A large community also wanted to be able to formally verify programs.
• The result: New control structures
  • Conditionals of various forms (including case)
  • Recursive functions
  • Loops
• Key idea of most of these control structures (usuaully implicit; eventually explicit): One entry point, one exit point.
• Dijkstra, a few years earlier, had been working on parallel programming.
• Dijkstra, in some sense, was serving as (unasigned) spokesperson for a much larger group.
• The original title of the article was A Case Against Go to

The Letter: Go To Statement Considered Harmful

• Thesis?
• Structure of argument?
• What does he mean by a (mixed) sequence of textual and/or dynamic indices?
• What does he mean by coordinate?
• Why would one care about indices or coordinates?
• What does he mean by the number of people in the room exmaple?
• Possible counter arguments?

Algorithm 306: The Interface

• What is the purpose of this algorithm?
• What distinguishes it from other algorithms for computing permutations?
• Are there other goals of the algorithm?
• Does it meet those goals?

Algorithm 306: The Implementation

• What are the arguments, the local variables, the own variables?
• What general purposes do they seem to serve?
• What's going on at L2?
• Why isn't the sequence of L4 and L5 represented as a loop?

  L4: if a[i] = p then go to L2;
      if a[i] < p then r := i;
  L5: i := i-1; 
      go to L4;
  L2: ...
  

• You will continue to explore these questions in HW2.