Paper Info
Title
An empirical study of the use of the GOTO statement
Abstract
This paper reports on the results of an empirical study on the use of the GOTO statement. A lack of empirical studies on this issue has been acknowledged [1–4]. In this experiment, a total of 311 Cobol programs were input to a Cobol program analyzer for analysis of GOTO usage. The data supplied by the analyzer was then used by SAS (Statistical Analysis System) for statistical analysis. The results of the analysis show that programs with incorrect output used more GOTOs than did programs with correct output. Also, the mean time to debug programs using GOTOs was considerably longer than the mean time to debug GOTO-less programs. There are significant (at the 0.01 level) positive linear and quadratic correlations between the number of GOTOs and debugging time. Furthermore, it is found that programs containing at least one GOTO statement had significantly more “bad performs” (a perform statement invoking paragraphs above, rather than below) than did the GOTO-less programs. Also, in terms of program style, on the average, programs containing at least one GOTO statement had a significantly higher number of mismatched IF-ELSEs, and a higher number of bad indents in True-False tasks, than did programs containing no GOTO statements.
Year
DOI
Venue
1990
10.1016/0164-1212(90)90088-4
Journal of Systems and Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
empirical study,goto statement
COBOL,Programming language,Computer science,Quadratic equation,Time complexity,Empirical research,Goto,Debugging,Statistical analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
11
3
The Journal of Systems & Software
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.71
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
B. A. Benander1161.22
N. Gorla2242.25
A. C. Benander3161.22