[andi999]

The goto thing is one of my pet peeve, somehow it caught on, maybe it made people feel good so they can look down on others. There is basically 2 arguments against it: Knuths article arguing for goto (read it if you havent), and the observation that gotos and state machines (which are considered best practices) are basically equivalent (just convert the goto labels to your states).

[qsort]

I'm familiar with Knuth's argument. That argument was primarily based on the fact that it's hard to replicate the exact control flow of a goto statement with structured programming. While the argument certainly has merit (a relatively more recent example is Duff's device), 2020 compilers are more often than not able to find the most optimal structure anyway, making it largely redundant. It's like saying programs should be allowed to rewrite their machine code just because in a Von Neumann architecture you are technically allowed to, there is a point but it's not in contradiction with goto statements being mostly the inferior way to solve the problem. From a 2020 perspective I'd argue that if you really need that kind of performance you are probably already inlining assembly, so it's kind of a moot point.

> gotos and state machines (which are considered best practices) are basically equivalent

WTF? State machines can be implemented in a lot of ways: mutually recursive calls, pattern matching, function pointers... In what sense are they "equivalent" to gotos? Also what does it mean that state machines "are considered best practices"?