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COME FROM /n./ A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; `COME FROM' 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'. `COME FROM' was first proposed in R. Lawrence Clark's "A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less programming", which appeared in a 1973 Datamation issue (and was reprinted in the April 1984 issue of "Communications of the ACM"). This parodied the then-raging `structured programming' holy wars (see considered harmful). Mythically, some variants are the `assigned COME FROM' and the `computed COME FROM' (parodying some nasty control constructs in FORTRAN and some extended BASICs). Of course, multi-tasking (or non-determinism) could be implemented by having more than one `COME FROM' statement coming from the same label.

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