[very common] 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 (text at
http://www.acm.org/classics). 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. (Years afterwards, a contrary view
contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably,
"`Goto considered harmful' considered harmful'"'. 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
realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has
remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered silly'
found at various places in this lexicon is related).
COME FROM n.
A semi-mythical language construct dual to the
`go to' COME FROM <label> would cause the referenced label
to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached
it control would quietly and automagically be transferred to
the statement following the COME FROM....
Unix /yoo'niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun
on Multic very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An
interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson
after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could
play games on his scavenged PDP-7....
