EDIT:
How bad is the goto statement really, and why?
It depends on the exact situation. I can’t remember any time where I found it made the code more readable than refactoring. It also depends on your personal view of readability – some people dislike it more than others, as is clear from the other answers. (As a point of interest, it’s widely used in generated code – all of the async/await code in C# 5 is based on effectively a lot of gotos).
The problem is that situations where goto
tends to be used tend to be the kind of situations where refactoring aids things anyway – whereas goto
sticks with a solution which becomes harder to follow as the code gets more complicated.
Is there a more effective way to break the main loop than using the ‘goto’ statement?
Absolutely. Extract your method out into a separate function:
while (ProcessValues(...))
{
// Body left deliberately empty
}
...
private bool ProcessValues()
{
for (int i = 0; i < 15; i++)
{
// Do something
return false;
}
return true;
}
I generally prefer doing this over introducing an extra local variable to keep track of “have I finished” – although that will work too, of course.