That's fair. From just the original article, it's hard to guess what Dijkstra's intent was or if he even had a clear idea himself. But if you look at the "goto

That's fair. From just the original article, it's hard to guess what Dijkstra's intent was or if he even had a clear idea himself. But if you look at the "goto debate" of the time -- the various letters published by various people pointing out "how would you do the following without goto?" as others had meanwhile started treating goto as sinful and avoiding goto with the moral zeal of new converts -- then it appears that regardless of Dijkstra's intention, at least the debate among most programmers at the time was about abandoning "goto" even in the absence of other compensating control structures. So it appears to me that the debate was settled, and eventually faded away into a catchphrase, not simply by everyone agreeing that goto is evil persuaded by Dijkstra's arguments, as the popular opinion holds, but by languages adding most of the control structures that people were using "goto" for, under different names, until ad-hoc "goto" became less and less necessary. (And even Dijkstra's response to those responses, namely, his "On a somewhat disappointing correspondence" (original: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1009.PDF http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1009.PDF / transcript: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1009.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...), which incidentally is a good example of why they used to say that arrogance is measured in nano-Dijkstras, reveals that for example he was against short-circuiting AND/OR ("conditional connectives"), that he wrote his loops with boolean variables checked in the loop condition rather than break, and that he wrote of "all sorts of “programming language features” that seem better ignored than exploited" -- so in the original when he writes that "whatever clauses are suggested (e.g. abortion clauses) they should satisfy the requirement..." it's not clear that break/continue would satisfy his requirement because it's never specified, as you say.) And as you say, it's not clear that it was an improvement as far as language research goes, because it's far from obvious that the set we've settled on is the most natural or useful one: C has while, do-while, and for, each with break and continue, but alternatives like repeat-until (expressible as do {...} while(!(...));) were contenders, and especially Zahn's "event indicators" system looks quite nice (http://www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/knuth.dec74.html#event http://www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/knuth.dec74.html#e...). (I guess in Python it's not unusual to do something similar using exceptions, so they've returned in some form.)