in some languages you would be highly restricted if there weren't any "goto"s

I'm curious about the intent behind the poll in this thread; are you meaning to form an opinion based on the general consensus?

I find them useful to do cleanup in functions that can fail, so I dont have to free all the resources everywhere, I can just goto the end, and put all the frees there

I never use goto statements. It's generally unsafe to change the flow of an application in this way. Almost in every situation there are more suitable techniques that are safer, and which won't create spaghetti.

If you used a goto in production code I would fire you on the spot.[/quote]

Which is fine, since I don't want to belong to religious organizations based around dogmas conjured on word-of-mouth lore.

I can't imagine what would happen if someone dared overload an operator.

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Djikstra has the misfortune of being misquoted ever since he wrote the article. But the context in which was written was different and reasons were long lost by many generations that came in between. He proposed that goto functionality be replaced with higher semantic constructs, such as for and while loops. And later, functions... The horror....

So in that context the question would be: do you ever use goto instead of a for loop?int i = 0;
start:
if (i == 100) goto end;
i++;
goto start;
end:
;Because when he wrote that, this is what code looked like.

And since people got creative, it went further:int i = 0;
int j = 1;
start:
i++;
if (j %2&& j%3 == 0) goto phase 3
goto phase3;
phase2:
j++;
goto start:
phase3:
goto p;Oh, right. They didn't have functions either, so p was return address. So the above code would be used like this:0x221: p = 0x223;
0x222: goto start:
0x223:
// and later
0x300: p = 0x302;
0x301: goto start:
0x302: Pray that you counted the bytes in advance correctly, since inserting a line and running out of space might mean renumber all jumps in code below.

BASIC was really great high level language which had gosub that allowed prameterless function calling as well as looping constructs, thereby eliminating the need for such code. But as gurus would say, a lot of optimization opportunities were lost due to these high-level languages (true to an extent).

BASIC still had numbering problem, so you'd start writing the program with each line as multiple of 10. When new stuff was inserted, you'd stuff it in between, maybe as 15 or 25. And if you ran out and had to renumber, gosubs were suddenly broken since they relied on line numbers. So functions were usually put at some high number, such as 2000, 2200, 2500, leaving enough room in between.

In C, goto can be used idiomatically as error handler.
In C++ there is not much use that cannot typically be replaced using either break or continue, both available in Java as well. It doesn't cause problems with auto-allocation either, compared to setjmp/longjmp which is more commonly found in C.
Java does define goto keyword but it's not implemented.
PHP recently added it, most other languages do not have it.

I find them useful to do cleanup in functions that can fail, so I dont have to free all the resources everywhere, I can just goto the end, and put all the frees there