[kevin_thibedeau]

Tracing through goto spaghetti is not more comprehensible than a structured switch with clearly defined regions for each state. This is the sort of abuse that gives goto a bad name. The only thing worse is table driven state machines calling function pointers scattered everywhere.

[colanderman]

State machines implemented with gotos have very clearly defined regions for each state: the space between each label. Switch-based state machines are fine, but become hard to follow when e.g. you need a loop around a couple states, and are often abused to allow changing states from a non-lexically-local context (e.g. within a function call).

At a high level, this:

    goto NewState;

is no less comprehensible or spaghetti-prone than this:

    state = NEW_STATE;
    break;

[kbumsik]

That’s what I am thinking of. These days people use goto only to reduce spaghetti code in very specific use cases in C and nothing more.