Comment by lerno
3 days ago
That's the kind of thing I was thinking about. You can solve that with a switch in C3, but it's not as nice. However, this accounts for no more than 1% of all my goto uses (from a quick inspection), which is too little to build a feature from (discipline is needed to prevent a language from ballooning, it's hard to say no). I am looking for some use for it that can redeem its inclusion.
I agree it's very rare. I have this goto. A few that go to common return block that can be handled by other means and the rest is either error handling or things handled by labelled break or switch.
I mean we know you can program without it and defer/labelled switch and labelled break/continue cover 99%+ of use cases of it. I am still not convinced those are in fact easier to read but I get it's a reasonable design choice to make.
They have different wins. I think labelled break/continue help because they are clearer in locally expressing what the point is. If you see `goto NEXT;` you can kind of guess the intention, but `continue OUTER;` doesn't require you to read the code at the label and check what's happening there. `defer catch` and `defer try` helps avoiding some booleans otherwise needed with just a basic defer. `defer` on its own otherwise sometimes needs booleans to track what should be closed. With goto those naturally go to different cleanup sections.
I keep revisiting goto though. I like it a lot for its simplicity.