Considered harmful




Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars.

Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice.

In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y".

The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.

[Jargon File]





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CONNIVER
Co-NP
CONS
cons
conservative evaluation
COME FROM
considered harmful
Directed Oc
fall through
goto
consistently complete
console
console jockey
Consortium for Lexical Research
constant angular velocity