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International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies

Ada-Europe 1996: Reliable Software Technologies — Ada-Europe '96 pp 385–395Cite as

Where does GOTO Go to?

  • The Ada 95 Programming Language
  • Conference paper
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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1088))

Abstract

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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Stuttgart, D-70565, Stuttgart, Germany

    Wolfgang Gellerich, Markus Kosiol & Erhard Ploedereder

Authors
  1. Wolfgang Gellerich
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  2. Markus Kosiol
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  3. Erhard Ploedereder
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wolfgang Gellerich .

Editor information

Alfred Strohmeier

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gellerich, W., Kosiol, M., Ploedereder, E. (1996). Where does GOTO Go to?. In: Strohmeier, A. (eds) Reliable Software Technologies — Ada-Europe '96. Ada-Europe 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1088. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013504

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013504

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61317-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68457-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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