[throw-away_42]

From the opening paragraph of Edsger W. Dijkstra's letter to the CACM editor:

More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code).

"Harmful" seems to me a perfectly appropriate characterization of the words "disastrous" and "abolished". If anything, it tones them down.

[sedatk]

Similarly, "A case against" is way more toned down than "harmful." I agree that the opening statement is a strong stance and fits to the new title, but the article mostly focuses on proliferation of goto as a generic flow-control construct rather than exceptional such as using it as a "defer"-like construct in C where there's no alternative. I still think Wirth's edits hid the nuances in the article and helped fostering a strongly opionated dogma against goto by gifting a slogan to the masses.