'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers, but it's worth remembering that he made that statement in the context of an argument with Donald Knuth. Knuth won: ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070927094626/http://pplab.snu.a... See also http://web.archive.org/web/20051128093253/http://kerneltrap.... about goto

Good uses of goto are very rare with current programming languages. The only cases where I have found good uses were with languages that did not have exception handling and in each cases, there was some deficiencies in the specifications and the code containing the goto has disappeared with the corrected specifications. Maybe this was luck.

I still think it is ridiculous to hate goto.