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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

>Eiichi Goto

Is it nominative determinism if it's 2 years before the introduction of Goto (1956, Fortran apparently)

Or maybe it was named in his honour?

While the first public release of Fortran was in 1956, its design started in 1954 and the GOTO statement was already included in the preliminary Fortran from 1954.

Besides the inventor of parametron, there is also Kazushige Goto, who became famous after writing in 2002 the library GotoBLAS, which was for some years the fastest library for linear algebra and which inspired all later such libraries. He later worked at Microsoft, then at Intel.

What is funny is that searching right now "Kazushige Goto" in Bing, it immediately returned a confident AI answer that "Kazushige Goto was a Japanese scientist who invented the parametron in 1954 while he was a ...".

I pity those who believe any of the AI answers that most search engines force now upon their users.

I wonder if there is any relationship between the 2 Goto, but it is unlikely, because Goto is not rare among the Japanese family names.

Goto (as in "Go to") and Goto (as in the romaji version of one of 後藤, 五藤, 五島, …) is simple two things that sound/look the same when written in ASCII w/o spaces. :)

As a family name, it seems to be:

後藤

where the first character means "behind" or "back" and the second character refers to wisteria vines.

(The first character is familiar to some of the martial arts practitioners, because it has an alternative pronunciation, "kō" instead of "go", which is used in the expression "kō-kutsu-shitsu", which is normally abbreviated to "kō-kutsu", and which means "with the back knee bent".)

Please see: “nominative determinism”

The last name "Goto" in this case is actually read Gotou (ごとう), but romanization methods are their own flamewar. There's much less emphasis put on the "go" part than the "tou", so pronunciation doesn't actually sound anything like the English word "goto" at all.

Imagine the spanish word gato. Now elongate the "to", and change the ga to go, and you're close.

TBF, do we actually know how goto the statement was intended to be pronounced?

It's like saying Bob Gif is pronounced with a J so sounds nothing like the file format.....

Yes, there is only one reasonable pronunciation of the Fortran code word which is an amalgam of the English words "go to".

GIF is an initialism, with no comparable basis.

>It's like saying Bob Gif is pronounced with a J so sounds nothing like the file format.....

You mean, it sounds exactly like the file format...

/Please see/goto/

sheesh

pronounced `go toe`

Unlike the Fortran statement which is pronounced `jo toe`.

There's also GotoBLAS, developed by Kazushige Goto. I wonder if they have any relation or if it's a relatively common name.

Very common in Japan, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Got%C5%8D_(surname) . (Confusingly there is both a Mariko Goto who used to be the singer in a band named Midori and a Japanese-American violinist named Midori Goto.)

Allegedly 35th most common according to some random website[1][2]

1: https://myoji-yurai.net/searchResult.htm?myojiKanji=%E5%BE%8...

2: https://myoji-yurai.net/prefectureRanking.htm

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