See Brian Kernighan's explanation in 1981. Still good.
http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/tutorial/ten-commandments/bwk-on-pascal.html
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 12:22:26PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Rob Wilkens wrote:
> >
> > However, I have always been taught, and have always believed that
> > "goto"s are inherently evil. They are the creators of spaghetti code
>
> No, you've been brainwashed by CS people who thought that Niklaus Wirth
> actually knew what he was talking about. He didn't. He doesn't have a
> frigging clue.
>
> > (you start reading through the code to understand it (months or years
> > after its written), and suddenly you jump to somewhere totally
> > unrelated, and then jump somewhere else backwards, and it all gets ugly
> > quickly). This makes later debugging of code total hell.
>
> Any if-statement is a goto. As are all structured loops.
>
> Ans sometimes structure is good. When it's good, you should use it.
>
> And sometimes structure is _bad_, and gets into the way, and using a
> "goto" is just much clearer.
>
> For example, it is quite common to have conditionals THAT DO NOT NEST.
>
> In which case you have two possibilities
>
> - use goto, and be happy, since it doesn't enforce nesting
>
> This makes the code _more_ readable, since the code just does what
> the algorithm says it should do.
>
> - duplicate the code, and rewrite it in a nesting form so that you can
> use the structured jumps.
>
> This often makes the code much LESS readable, harder to maintain,
> and bigger.
>
> The Pascal language is a prime example of the latter problem. Because it
> doesn't have a "break" statement, loops in (traditional) Pascal end up
> often looking like total shit, because you have to add totally arbitrary
> logic to say "I'm done now".
>
> Linus
>
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