The Joke Is On Us: How Ruby 1.9 Supports the Goto Statement

23 Nov 2014 • patshaughnessy.net

The goto statement is one of the most infamous and troublesome features of old, archaic languages like Fortran. It allowed programmers to quickly create spaghetti code that was confusing and impossible to understand. Thankfully when structured programming came into use in the late 1960s and 1970s with Algol, Pascal and later C, goto was no longer necessary.

This is all ancient history: why am I bringing it up? Well, I just discovered this week that Ruby, one of the most beautiful and expressive languages in use today, includes support for the goto statement!

Doesn’t count unless it also supports line numbers. Real programming languages support numbering every-single-line. ;-)