> Indeed the first thing you do when you try to understand code of that era is to print it out, get your markers out, and start drawing arrows all over the gree

> Indeed the first thing you do when you try to understand code of that era is to print it out, get your markers out, and start drawing arrows all over the green-bar paper so you can start to make some sense of where control flow is going. The first thing I do is change the indentation to reflect the structure. The basic blocks then become obvious. If you don't do that (and most people in the era didn't), it's about as hard to read as left aligned C code. With it, it's not that much harder to read than indented C code. Unfortunately not indenting the code just reflected a bigger problem: programmers back then were totally oblivious to the structure indenting revealed or how they could be used to reduce the difficulty in reading the code: basic blocks, limited scopes and the like. It's not that they were lazy, it's that they didn't understand how code is built. Dijkstra taught computer science. That is what he was up against. At the time, all programming languages used goto almost exclusively for flow control. In some ways, it is the simplest way to do it. One construct did the job of the multitudes we use today: for, while, until and even recursion. However if you didn't follow some simple rules the goto's invariably ended up as spaghetti and the end result ended up being there was far more spaghetti in production than structured code. The two simple rules are: 1. backward goto's were only for loops, and 2. you must not goto inside an inner basic block. These are exact same rules for and while loops with {} blocks enforce. But it takes some self discipline to apply those rules, and no one is going to do it if they don't understand why they are important. Such understanding requires good high level intuition about how code is structured. It took a long while to teach such intuition. If you got rid of the goto's by replacing them with higher level constructs like for and while, you not only got rid of the problem - you also forced young students to think in terms of code flow. That is what Dijkstra was arguing for in "Goto's considered harmful". Today, times have changed. You very rarely see a badly structured goto in the Linux kernel code, even though C allows it. I'm not sure why that is - because I'm pretty sure if Dijkstra hadn't won out and Javascript and it's ilk still had goto's then shudder. The coding standards in web programming is a cluster fuck as it is: I swear there isn't a week go by when I don't come up against a broken web page. Just this week I was forced to fire up the browsers js debugger to change a field on a linkedin.com form, and manually do "$0.value = 'yes'" to move on. ffs. But yes, in projects with coding standards as high as the Linux kernels, everybody that (is allowed to?) contribute seems to have a very good understanding of how to make code that others find easy to read and understand, a ban on gotos would be counterproductive. Despite the discipline they require, gotos can be used to make the code cleaner and shorter. You see numerous examples of that in the kernel.