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Seven Obscure Languages in Seven Weeks
book

Seven Obscure Languages in Seven Weeks

by Dmitry Zinoviev
October 2024
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 54m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Seven Obscure Languages in Seven Weeks

Branching

“Branching” is a fancy name for the infamous GOTO statement. To be fair, it became infamous only after Edsger Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of modern computer science, published his open letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” [Dij68] in 1968. Before that, GOTO had been considered a preferred way to control program execution flow. One can prove that GOTO suffices for implementing conditional statements, loops, and choices. A powerful tool it is, so don’t blame APL for depending on branching.

You can use the branch arrow L only in a function definition, not in the interaction mode. The function depends on line numbers and labels (neither available in the interaction mode). So, first, a word about labels.

An APL label ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798888651421Errata Page