Ok, I lied...I just checked some of my FORTRAN source code written in 1985 and there were a handful of goto statements in 20,000 lines of code. But since FORTRAN, I have not used goto's (to the best of my knowledge :-)

Anyone who has been around for a long time may remember that the GOTO-less programming controversy was laid to rest (in FORTRAN anyway) by an article published in the December 1973 issue of Datamation magazine. I kept a copy of that article all these years in my humour file as it proposed solving the problem by eliminating GOTO statements entirely and replacing them with the COME FROM statement. Here is an excerpt from the article entitled "A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less Programming" (Thanks to the miracle of the internet, the full article can now be found online at this link: http://www.fortran.com/come\_from.html ) --------------------------------------------------------- "This statement causes control to be transferred to the next statement (the statement immediately following the COME FROM) upon completion of the designated statement. Example: 10 J = 1 11 COME FROM 20 12 WRITE (6,40) J STOP 13 COME FROM 10 20 J = J+2 40 FORMAT (I4) Explanation: In this example, J is set to I by state- ment 10. Statement 13 then causes control to be passed to statement 20, which sets J to 3. Statement 11 then causes control to be passed to statement 12, which writes the current value of J. The STOP statement then terminates the program." ---------------------------------------------- In all seriousness, I have not had to use a goto statement in all the code I have written since the day that structured FORTRAN replaced FORTRAN IV on our mainframes in the early 80's. And I am including all the languages I have since used up until today: C, C++, PL/1, Java, C#, VB, Lisp, APL, and JavaScript. It is almost always possible to refactor logic that appears to require a goto into an equivalent form that doesn't. If your nesting is too deep, refactor into shorter, more succinct, and readable methods. Modern IDE's make refactoring dead easy and I have made extensive use of refactoring support in Eclipse as well as Visual Studio. But for any fans of computer history, do yourself a favour and read the entire article at the link above. Apologies for the Canadian (ie. British) spelling of 'humour' and 'favour'. I know they are somewhat anachronistic today, but that was how I was taught.