> If goto is easily available in the high level language then creating a state machine is trivial I guess. It's still painful, because whichever state you're i

> If goto is easily available in the high level language then creating a state machine is trivial I guess. It's still painful, because whichever state you're in probably cares about different data. Some data only needs to exist during some states. Factoring states into separate functions means each gets its own scope, and can explicitly pass only data needed for the next state forward. > If it's not then the compiler should be able to do TCO with jumps/gotos in the output asm or transpiled code It's nice to be able to indicate explicitly to the compiler (and other developers!) that you expect tail calls to be optimized, rather than crossing your fingers and hoping that nobody else comes along later and accidentally adds something after the call. Scala optimizes tail recursion by default, but it also has a `tailrec` annotation that causes the compiler to throw an error if it isn't able to respect that intent.