Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
| Domain | Definition |
Computing | Goto |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
GOTO is a command found in many programming languages which instructs the computer to jump to another point in the computer program. It is the fundamental operation which can be used for transfer of control from one part of a program to another, and most compilers will translate other flow control statements into GOTOs.
GOTO is found in FORTRAN, Algol, COBOL, SNOBOL, BASIC, C, C++, Pascal and many other languages, particularly assembly languages. In the assembly languages, the GOTO command is usually called BRA (from "branch"), JMP or JUMP, and is often the only way of organizing program flow. However GOTO is not found in all programming languages. Certain languages, such as Java, do not contain a GOTO statement.
Unlike a function call, a GOTO does not demand any preparation or restructuring of the code. Because of that, it becomes very easy to produce inconsistent, incomplete and generally unmaintainable spaghetti code. Consequently, as structured programming became more prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, numerous computer scientists came to the conclusion that programs should always use the structured flow commands (loops, if-then statements, etc.) in place of GOTO. However, others believed that even though the use of GOTO is often bad practice, there are some tasks that cannot be straightforwardly accomplished in many programming languages without the use of GOTO statements, such as exception handling.
One famous criticism of GOTO is the article by Edsger Dijkstra called Go to statement considered harmful (Communications of the ACM 11, 147-148. 1968). Donald Knuth's Structured Programming with goto statements (Computing Surveys, 6(4):261-301, December 1974) considers some of the places where GOTO may be the appropriate tool. Generally these are in situations where a particular programming structure is not available. In these cases, GOTO can generally be used to emulate the desired structure, since it is one of the fundamental building blocks of programming.
See also:
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Goto."
| The following table is compiled from various sources, across various languages. When English abbreviations or acronyms come from a non-English source, this is noted. | |||
| Entry | Source | Expression | Field |
GOTO | Portuguese | GO TO | Computing, Electrical Engineering |
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |||
Crosswords: GOTO |
| Specialty definitions using "GOTO": Ada ♦ code police, COMIT ♦ get.com ♦ HLISP ♦ keyword ♦ RTL/2 ♦ tight loop. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "GOTO" is also a word in the following languages with English translations in parentheses. Italian (goth), Portuguese (GO TO, GOTO). |
| Domain | Usage | |
Movie/TV Titles | L'île d'amour Goto (1968) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
References | |||
Books |
| ||
High Tech |
| ||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| "GOTO" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 64.29% of the time. "GOTO" is used about 14 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 64.29% | 9 | 117,287 |
| Noun (proper) | 35.71% | 5 | 157,705 |
| Total | 100.00% | 14 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| The following table summarizes the usage of "GOTO" based on a population census conducted in the United States. Ranks and frequencies are based on all names reported and classified. |
| Name | Usage/Gender | Usage per 100 million Persons | Rank in USA |
| Goto | Last name | 1,000 | 18,682 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits. | |||
| Country | Name |
| Japan | Goto Co., Ltd. |
| (more examples...) |
Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Containing "GOTO": wimpy-never-let-anyone-know-that-you-goto-church. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Language | Translations for "GOTO"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | ||||||||||||||||
Chinese | 登月 (goto the moon). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Danish | goto (GO TO), go to (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Dutch | GO TO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Finnish | GOTO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
French | GO TO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
German | GOTO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Greek | GO TO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Italian | GO TO (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Pig Latin | otogay GOTO (GO TO), GO TO (GO TO). (various references) GOTO-instruktion (GO TO), hoppinstruktion (GO TO). (various references) | ||||||||||||||||
Derivations | |
Words containing "GOTO": postvagotomy, vagotomies, vagotomy, vagotonia, vagotonias, vagotonic. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "g-o-o-t" | |
-1 letter: goo, got, oot, tog, too. | |
-2 letters: go, to. | |
| Words containing the letters "g-o-o-t" | |
+1 letter: outgo. | |
+2 letters: agorot, cogito, forgot, galoot, gentoo, grotto, hotdog, photog, stooge, trogon. | |
+3 letters: agoroth, bigfoot, booting, bootleg, cogitos, dogtrot, footage, footing, galloot, galoots, gentoos, gooiest, gosport, grottos, gumboot, hooting, hotdogs, looting, mooting, octagon, ologist, otology, outglow, outgoes, outgone, outgrow, photogs, rootage, rooting, sooting, stooged, stooges, theolog, tooling, tooting, trogons. | |
+4 letters: autogiro, autogyro, bigfoots, bongoist, boosting, bootlegs, boughpot, cetology, cognovit, coopting, cytology, dogtooth, dogtrots, ethology, etiology, fetology, footages, footgear, footings, footling, footslog, galloots, goalpost, goitrous, golgotha, gonocyte, goofiest, goopiest, goosiest, gosports, grottoes, gumboots, kotowing, logotype, logotypy, longboat, monoglot, motoring, obligato, octagons, ologists, ontogeny, ontology, oogamete, oologist, outdodge, outdoing, outglows, outgoing, outgross, outgroup, outgrown, outgrows, oxtongue, photoing, polyglot, rogation, rogatory, roosting, rootages, scooting, shooting, sitology, snooting, soothing, stegodon, stooging, stooking, stooling, stooping, tabooing, theogony, theologs, theology, thorough, toboggan, tocology, tokology, tomogram, toolings, toothing, tootling, topology, trooping, typology, unforgot, vagotomy, yoghourt. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Modern 4. Usage: Commercial | 5. Usage Frequency 6. Names: Frequency 7. Names: Company Usage 8. Expressions | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Translations: Modern 11. Abbreviations 12. Acronyms | 13. Derivations 14. Anagrams 15. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
