Here's the actual quote, which is illuminating: “TeX was the first faily large program I had written since 1970; so it was my first nontrivial ‘structured prog

Here's the actual quote, which is illuminating: “TeX was the first faily large program I had written since 1970; so it was my first nontrivial ‘structured program,’ in the sense that I wrote it while consciously applying the methodology I had learned in the early 70s from Dijkstra, Hoare, Dahl, and others. I foudn that structural programming greatly increased my confidence in the correctness of the code, while the code still existed only on paper. Therefore I could wait until the whole program was written, before trying to debug any of it. This saved lots of time, because I din't have to prepare ‘dummy’ versions of nonexistent modules while testing modules that were already written; I could test everything in its final environment.” That said, there are still 337 instances of goto in tex.web by my quick and dirty count (grep goto tex.web | grep -v '@' | wc -l), which is perhaps an undercount since there are modules that might be included multiple times thanks to how the WEB system builds its Pascal output and I don't have a Pascal reformatter to make analyzing tex.p manageable.¹ 1. The choice to "compress" the Pascal output of tangle is one of the most inexplicable choices made in the development of the TeX ecosystem.