PEP 3107 and stronger typing (note: probably a newbie question)

[Paul Rubin]

Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> writes:
> This is interesting. Do you have any references we can read about this
> assertion -- specifically, that "GOTO" was not well loved (I assume
> "by the programming community at large") even by around 1966?
    
Dijkstra's famous 1968 "GOTO considered harmful" letter
(http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/) quotes a 1966 article by N. Wirth
and C.A.R. Hoare:

    The remark about the undesirability of the go to statement is far from
    new. I remember having read the explicit recommendation to restrict
    the use of the go to statement to alarm exits, but I have not been
    able to trace it; presumably, it has been made by C. A. R. Hoare. In
    [1, Sec. 3.2.1.] Wirth and Hoare together make a remark in the same
    direction in motivating the case construction: "Like the conditional,
    it mirrors the dynamic structure of a program more clearly than go to
    statements and switches, and it eliminates the need for introducing a
    large number of labels in the program."

    Reference: 1. Wirth, Niklaus, and Hoare C. A. R.  A contribution
    to the development of ALGOL. Comm. ACM 9 (June 1966), 413-432.