[vunderba]

Even though it’s not the main focus of the article, the sample code's odd structure is a bit distracting.

  int f()
  {
    foo:
        return 0;
    goto bar;
  }

  int g()
  {
    bar:
        return 1;
    goto foo;
  }

  int main()
  {
    return f();
  }

It's treating both "foo" and "bar" like the equivalents of encapsulated subroutines, but the goto statements will NEVER be executed unless there's a C variant or compiler switch I'm unfamiliar with.

[bramadityaw]

My point is exactly that. C is a structured, procedural programming language that will only consider procedurally scoped labels. You can't execute it because it is not valid C that a standard compiler would accept, and we should be thankful because of that.

[gs17]

I'm not even sure if the gotos not doing anything is the point or not. It definitely makes it less "harmful", at the cost of also not being useful.

[mock-possum]

Right? f runs and immediately returns 0

[Wowfunhappy]

Thank you, I looked at this and thought I must be missing something really obvious.

[bramadityaw]

I admit that the example is contrived, and the control flow can be followed quite clearly because of the example's size. However, imagine that f and g is placed in different source files in a large project. That's what Dijkstra detests about arbitrary labels, in that a program's control flow is only obvious to the guy who first wrote it.