It's the problem of worse programmers seeing something used, and then misusing it because they don't understand the fundamental reasoning that led to its use in

It's the problem of worse programmers seeing something used, and then misusing it because they don't understand the fundamental reasoning that led to its use in the first place. Graceful error exiting is to this day an unsolved problem in computer science (at least as far as the popular languages are concerned). Even after GOTO elimination hit its stride, Knuth noted: "Another important class of go to statements is an error exit. Such checks on the validity of data are very important, especially in software, and it seems to be the one class of go to's that still is considered ugly but necessary by today's leading reformers. Sometimes it is necessary to exit from several levels of control, cutting across code that may even have been written by other programmers; and the most graceful way to do this is a direct approach with a go to or its equivalent. Then the intermediate levels of the program can be written under the assumption that nothing will go wrong."