Dijkstra's take was significantly less spicy. The original title was "A Case Against the Goto Statement". Niklaus Wirth is actually the one who changed it (your wikipedia link covers this).

One of the best remembered, and which led to harmful prejudice against BASIC. While the foundation of the criticism makes sense, it led to silly notions as "there is never a case where GOTOs are useful" and "people who start with BASIC are broken programmers forever"

He was also against LISP, but turned around in 1999:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E... "I must confess that I was very slow on appreciating LISP’s merits. My first introduction was via a paper that defined the semantics of LISP in terms of LISP, I did not see how that could make sense, I rejected the paper and LISP with it."

The problem with unrestricted GOTO isn’t that they’re never useful or that bad people use them. The problem is specifically that they make predicate transformer semantics (and probably other formalisms) pragmatically useless.

For example in a language without GOTO inside an if statement the guarding condition is known to be a predicate (at least until another operation changes it) whereas in a language with unrestricted GOTO there is no guarantee whatsoever that the guard holds since execution could have jumped past it.

Whenever GOTO comes up, I have to mention Knuth's beautiful paper that was part of that argument: "Structured Programming with go to Statements" (1974). Some quotes:

"At the I F I P Congress in 1971 I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Eiichi Goto of Japan, who cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."

"For many years, the go to statement has been troublesome in the definition of correctness proofs and language semantics....Just recently, however, Hoare has shown that there is, in fact, a rather simple way to give an axiomatic definition of go to statements; indeed, he wishes quite frankly that it hadn't been quite so simple."

I cannot find anything written by Hoare about it, but Knuth goes on to describe it: the idea is that labels have associated preconditions and GOTOs have the semantics { precondition(L) } goto L { false }.

"Informally, a(L) [my "precondition(L)"] represents the desired state of affairs at label L; this definition says essentially that a program is correct if a(L) holds at L and before all "go to L" statements, and that control never "falls through" a go to statement to the following text. Stating the assertions a(L) is analogous to formulating loop invariants. Thus, it is not difficult to deal formally with tortuous program structure if it turns out to be necessary; all we need to know is the "meaning" of each label."

It is a very nice paper. Some sources:

http://www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/knuth.dec74.html

https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640

Indeed, which is why I offered the pragmatic qualifier. It easily follows that the weakest precondition for L is that at least one of the weakest preconditions for every goto to that L holds. One can possibly do even better with some kind of flow analysis. The issue isn't that it's impossible, it's that programming is hard enough and it makes it much harder to be sure the code is correct. Or maybe put another way "not difficult" for Knuth and for the typical working programmer (or me) aren't identical.

Thanks for sharing that paper! As an aside, it's really remarkable just how readable the state of the art papers such as the one you shared there from that era are. Either computing science has greatly advanced to the point where clarity is no longer achievable without years of specialized preparatory study or the quality of writing has regressed.

The GOTO-paper is widely misunderstood though. It is making a case for blocks and scopes and functions as structures which makes it easier to analyze and reason about the execution of complex programs. The case against unconstrained GOTO follows naturally from this since you can't have those structures in combination with unconstrained GOTO.

An the person who changed the title, inventing the now iconic trope "considered harmful" was none other than recently deceased Niklaus Wirth.