这些年来，我写了不少汇编语言。最终，每一种高级语言都被编译成gotos。好吧，叫它们“分支”或“跳跃”或其他什么，但它们是gotos。有人能写无goto汇编器吗?

当然，你可以向Fortran、C或BASIC程序员指出，gotos的泛滥就像意大利肉酱面一样。然而，答案不是避免它们，而是小心地使用它们。

刀可以用来准备食物，解救某人，或者杀死某人。我们会因为害怕后者而没有刀吗?同样，“后向”:不小心使用它会碍事，小心使用它会有所帮助。

使用“goto”使你的代码更易于阅读或运行得更快。只是不要让它把你的代码变成意大利面条。

“goto”的问题和“无goto编程”运动最重要的论点是，如果你过于频繁地使用它，尽管你的代码可能表现正确，但它会变得不可读、不可维护、不可审查等。在99.99%的情况下，“goto”会导致意大利面条代码。就我个人而言，我想不出任何好的理由来解释为什么我会使用“goto”。

1) The most common use of goto that I know of is emulating exception handling in languages that don't offer it, namely in C. (The code given by Nuclear above is just that.) Look at the Linux source code and you'll see a bazillion gotos used that way; there were about 100,000 gotos in Linux code according to a quick survey conducted in 2013: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/894. Goto usage is even mentioned in the Linux coding style guide: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle. Just like object-oriented programming is emulated using structs populated with function pointers, goto has its place in C programming. So who is right: Dijkstra or Linus (and all Linux kernel coders)? It's theory vs. practice basically.

There is however the usual gotcha for not having compiler-level support and checks for common constructs/patterns: it's easier to use them wrong and introduce bugs without compile-time checks. Windows and Visual C++ but in C mode offer exception handling via SEH/VEH for this very reason: exceptions are useful even outside OOP languages, i.e. in a procedural language. But the compiler can't always save your bacon, even if it offers syntactic support for exceptions in the language. Consider as example of the latter case the famous Apple SSL "goto fail" bug, which just duplicated one goto with disastrous consequences (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html):

if (something())
  goto fail;
  goto fail; // copypasta bug
printf("Never reached\n");
fail:
  // control jumps here

使用编译器支持的异常也会出现同样的错误，例如在c++中:

struct Fail {};

try {
  if (something())
    throw Fail();
    throw Fail(); // copypasta bug
  printf("Never reached\n");
}
catch (Fail&) {
  // control jumps here
}

But both variants of the bug can be avoided if the compiler analyzes and warns you about unreachable code. For example compiling with Visual C++ at the /W4 warning level finds the bug in both cases. Java for instance forbids unreachable code (where it can find it!) for a pretty good reason: it's likely to be a bug in the average Joe's code. As long as the goto construct doesn't allow targets that the compiler can't easily figure out, like gotos to computed addresses(**), it's not any harder for the compiler to find unreachable code inside a function with gotos than using Dijkstra-approved code.

(**) Footnote: Gotos to computed line numbers are possible in some versions of Basic, e.g. GOTO 10*x where x is a variable. Rather confusingly, in Fortran "computed goto" refers to a construct that is equivalent to a switch statement in C. Standard C doesn't allow computed gotos in the language, but only gotos to statically/syntactically declared labels. GNU C however has an extension to get the address of a label (the unary, prefix && operator) and also allows a goto to a variable of type void*. See https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Labels-as-Values.html for more on this obscure sub-topic. The rest of this post ins't concerned with that obscure GNU C feature.

标准C(即未计算的)goto通常不是无法在编译时找到不可达代码的原因。通常的原因是如下所示的逻辑代码。鉴于

int computation1() {
  return 1;
}

int computation2() {
  return computation1();
}

对于编译器来说，在以下3种结构中找到不可访问的代码同样困难:

void tough1() {
  if (computation1() != computation2())
    printf("Unreachable\n");
}

void tough2() {
  if (computation1() == computation2())
    goto out;
  printf("Unreachable\n");
out:;
}

struct Out{};

void tough3() {
  try {
    if (computation1() == computation2())
      throw Out();
    printf("Unreachable\n");
  }
  catch (Out&) {
  }
}

(请原谅我使用了与大括号相关的编码风格，但我试图使示例尽可能紧凑。)

Visual c++ /W4(即使使用/Ox)也无法在这些类型中找到无法到达的代码，而且正如您可能知道的那样，寻找无法到达的代码的问题通常是无法确定的。(如果你不相信我的话:https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2006/OptComp/slides/lecture02.pdf)

As a related issue, the C goto can be used to emulate exceptions only inside the body of a function. The standard C library offers a setjmp() and longjmp() pair of functions for emulating non-local exits/exceptions, but those have some serious drawbacks compared to what other languages offer. The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h explains fairly well this latter issue. This function pair also works on Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yz2ez4as.aspx), but hardly anyone uses them there because SEH/VEH is superior. Even on Unix, I think setjmp and longjmp are very seldom used.

2) I think the second most common use of goto in C is implementing multi-level break or multi-level continue, which is also a fairly uncontroversial use case. Recall that Java doesn't allow goto label, but allows break label or continue label. According to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/simple-142616.html, this is actually the most common use case of gotos in C (90% they say), but in my subjective experience, system code tends to use gotos for error handling more often. Perhaps in scientific code or where the OS offers exception handling (Windows) then multi-level exits are the dominant use case. They don't really give any details as to the context of their survey.

编辑补充:这两种使用模式出现在Kernighan和Ritchie的C语言书的第60页左右(取决于版本)。另一件值得注意的事情是，这两个用例都只涉及forward goto。MISRA C 2012版(不像2004版)现在允许goto，只要它们是向前的。

我们使用的goto规则是，goto可以跳转到函数中的单个退出清理点。在真正复杂的函数中，我们放松了这个规则，允许其他跳转。在这两种情况下，我们都避免了经常在错误代码检查中出现的深度嵌套的if语句，这有助于可读性和维护。

计算机科学家Edsger Dijkstra在该领域做出了重大贡献，他也因批评GoTo的使用而闻名。 维基百科上有一篇关于他观点的短文。