I was at JPL when we were developing these standards. C was still pretty new there, they used FORTRAN almost exclusively before that. In practice, this rule ha

I was at JPL when we were developing these standards. C was still pretty new there, they used FORTRAN almost exclusively before that. In practice, this rule had little impact. The only time you could justify using a goto was for cleanup, and you could always end-run around the rule. ... blah blah ... if (error) goto fail; ... blah blah ... if (error) goto fail; ... blah blah ... fail: ... cleanup ... just gets turned into do { ... blah blah ... if (error) break; ... blah blah ... if (error) break; ... etc... } while (0); if (error) { ... cleanup ... }