Because they lead to spaghetti code. In the past, programming languages didn’t have while loops, if statements, etc., and programmers used goto to make up the logic of their programs. It lead to an unmaintainable mess. That’s why the CS gods created methods, conditionals and loops. Structured programming was a revolution at the time. gotos … Read more
Everybody who is anti-goto cites, directly or indirectly, Edsger Dijkstra’s GoTo Considered Harmful article to substantiate their position. Too bad Dijkstra’s article has virtually nothing to do with the way goto statements are used these days and thus what the article says has little to no applicability to the modern programming scene. The goto-less meme … Read more
No, Python does not support labels and goto. It’s a (highly) structured programming language.
If you are using it to skip part of a large script for debugging (see Karl Nicoll’s comment), then if false could be a good option (not sure if “false” is always available, for me it is in /bin/false): # … Code I want to run here … if false; then # … Code I … Read more
James Gosling created the original JVM with support of goto statements, but then he removed this feature as needless. The main reason goto is unnecessary is that usually it can be replaced with more readable statements (like break/continue) or by extracting a piece of code into a method. Source: James Gosling, Q&A session
A coworker of mine said the only reason to use a GOTO is if you programmed yourself so far into a corner that it is the only way out. In other words, proper design ahead of time and you won’t need to use a GOTO later. I thought this comic illustrates that beautifully “I could … Read more