Without goto, you'd either introduce a bunch of unnecessary functions or do this: init; do { stuff; if (fail) continue; morestuff; } while (0

Without goto, you'd either introduce a bunch of unnecessary functions or do this: init; do { stuff; if (fail) continue; morestuff; } while (0); cleanup; Which I've seen in real code released to the public. Whoever does either of those things instead of just using a goto should be flogged in the town square. edit: Other usually-bad alternatives to goto are the pyramid-of-nested-ifs or a set of running "bad" flags/enum that disables each operation downstream of the error until the cleanup is reached.