'goto' - the debate between 'human' vs 'machine' programming

Scott wrote in response to: "I absolutely concur with John's conclusion: Academia, the elites or otherwise, saw the 'horrors' of goto and declared it an evil that was to be expunged from any language. The toolbox was diminished by this action in my humble opinion. Yet for us QBasic guys we still employ it. Boy does it get one out of a jam. Mimics real life doesn't it?" "I regard 'goto as the programming equivalent of the adjustable spanner. There are often better tools to use, using it wrongly can get you into real trouble, but it's rare to find a hacker who's not used it (just as mo hardware guy will use an adjustable spanner when there are better tools available, but I don't know of a serious hardware hacker who doesn't have one in the toolbox...) -tony " Heck, I even have an adjustable box-end wrench. *ducks* The folks who deplore GOTO are the 'Structured Programming' folks. Who have a lot of flavors and attempts at 'structured programming' behind them now, and keep chugging along. It's about sociable coding, as opposed to asocial 'solitary' coding. Which is important. But as an over-experienced Assembly Language programmer, I got into trouble in my 'Intro to C' course because I was in the habit of writing my own functions instead of using The Standard Library. -scott I'm not sure whether programming is done to benefit people or to make machines work better. Since computers are seldom user-friendly, they were'nt but now are easier to use thanks to GUIs, we have to ask then was is programming for? I remember programming in a few-line BASICs, well even further back - soldering a kit and program in strict machine-coding - and I wanted the computer to do certain tasks. I'm not sure these tasks were of any particular benefit done on an expensive early computer and they were that! I could do the same thing with pen & paper or a calculator, not spend time writing a few lines of code and hope I didn't make a mistake!!! The calculator was programmed to work efficiently and little or no programming was needed by me to make it work. Social coding here is effective in the sense it solves a problem for me. The machine works in an excellent fashion as a solitary instrument. In this case it benefits me. Is this the true value of programming and using a 'goto' to get out of a jam so to speak can be very effective. Works in real life, particularly useful around Belgian horses. Can this be wrong? Computing forever! Murray