[MaulingMonkey]

> But there are gotos behind many (though not all) of these modern constructs...

I'd argue that e.g. an x86 LOOP instruction is far more equivalent to a do/while loop than a goto. Most of the jump instructions I see in my disassembly aren't unconditional like goto is - if anything, car engines are closer to horses in what they accomplish than, say, jnz is to goto! Even jmp certainly doesn't used named labels, as any goto worth it's salt will use - instead you'll see absolute or relative address offsets.

>> Personally, I do not mind gotos. It feels closer to the reality of how a computer operates.

There's a time and place to get close to the hardware, but I've never felt that goto got me meaningfully closer. Of course, my first and primary exposure to GOTO was in BASIC - where it was interpreted.

You want to get close to the hardware? Play with intrinsics. Open up the disassembly and poke at it with a profiler. Find out if your algorithm manages to execute in mostly L1 cache, or if it's spilling all the way out into RAM fetches. Figure out where you need to prefetch, where you're stalling, where your cycles are being spent. Diagnose and fix some false sharing. Write your own (dis)assembler - did you know there's typically no actual nop instruction? You simply emit e.g. xchg eax, eax, which happens to do nothing of note, and label it "nop" for clarity.

IMO, you'll have more time to do these things when embracing the advantages that structured programming can provide. Of course, I may be speaking to the choir, at least on that last point.

[spc476]

NOP is most certainly a NOP on modern x86 CPUs. Yes, the encoding matches what would be XCHG EAX,EAX (or AX,AX or RAX,RAX) but it hasn't been that for quite some time as it could create a pipeline stall waiting for [RE]AX to be ready for the following instruction.

As for JNE not being a GOTO, it most certainly is. It just so happens to only happen under certain circumstances (along with the other conditional jumps, and yes, that's how they are described). Compare:

    IF X <= 45 GOTO THERE

with

    CMP EAX,45
    JLE THERE

Not much of a difference if you ask me. Also, the LOOP instruction is more of a FOR loop than a DO/WHILE, as the ECX register is decremented as part of the instruction.

And let me assure you, when writing assembly, you almost always use labels. A disassembly will show you the absolute/relative address because that's all it has to go by.

[rawdisk]

Gotos in spitbol can be conditional or unconditional.