Where Does GOTO Go to?

Although GOTO has long been criticized for being “unstructured” and causing “unreliable” programs, it is still in use and even modern languages like Ada95 provide GOTO. Why? This paper presents the results of a study in which we examined 316 MB of Ada source code in order to find the frequency and typical applications of GOTO. It turned out that about 99% of all examined files do not contain any GOTO, but we also found “spaghetti code”, generally justified by efficiency arguments. We analyzed whether GOTO really improved efficiency and examined sources containing GOTO by code inspection in order to determine its typical applications.

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