Why is goto poor practise? [duplicate]

Answer 1

It means you haven't designed the code procedurally.

If you build your whiles and ifs properly, you should rarely ever need goto.

Rarely is the key word. There are times where it's useful. In that sense, many people nowadays just explicitly throw and catch exceptions, just to avoid the dreaded goto.

Answer 2

GOTO short circuits your control flow, thereby undermining your design and opening the door to debug and maintenance nightmares.

Answer 3

Note that Djkstra wrote "GOTO Considered Harmful", not "GOTO Considered Deadly". It has its places. Unfortunately, the judgement to know when to use it comes after you've got some experience in maintaining other people's code, especially code that was written years ago by people who no longer work in your company. Thus, it's best to avoid goto as much as you can until you have that experience.

Answer 4

It can rapidly lead to spaghetti code.

Answer 5

It encourages bad coding style, basically. See: Goto Considered Harmful [pdf]

Answer 6

Readability becomes a problem, and flow of logic can have unintended effects by the use of goto.

I think its funny that the .net compiler will change some case/switch statements to use goto.