"If telling a program in a next step/program to 'go to' unsettled information is an issue, would the solution be installing a 'wait for check' of sorts before moving on(?)"
Dijkstra's argument, as the margins tracked it: a program is static text; the process it produces spreads out in time — and human brains are bad at the second thing. The margin at the handoff problem: "Hard for programmers to visualize scale of that operation at times post handoff / even while building." Unbridled go to destroys the coordinates you'd need to say where the process even is — the margin's phrase for it: "Moving target of linear action statuses."
Does 'go to' = 'loop' (?) for a CPU(?) — so could mean something that happens later vs what [is] setup to occur.Working out the primitive from the 1968 text alone, no CS course in between — and landing on exactly the later-vs-setup split the letter turns on.
I imagine the indexes get very longggg.At the textual-index machinery. Then, at values living outside the programmer's control: "Is this essentially an uncontrollable loop that points at one initial action then [calls] out(?)" — the failure mode sketched before Dijkstra names it.
This letter opened five minutes after the Bitcoin whitepaper's Done stamp — and the margins treat them as one subject. Satoshi: don't accept a payment until the chain proves the state. Dijkstra: don't jump a program into state you can't prove you've reached. His closing wait-for-check question is the same guard rail both papers reach for, inked by a reader who noticed the rhyme in real time. At the references, Böhm and Jacopini — the men who proved go-to unnecessary — get the morning's lightest ink: "Old Italian dude(?)" and a "LoL."
Forty-five minutes, both pages inked, and the structured-programming answer arrived as a question in the margin before history confirmed it.
"Done 08/09/26 @ 9:05 A.M." — second finish of the morning. Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" carries a start stamp nineteen minutes later.