C Keywords - goto

goto

As in all high-level programming languages the goto statement causes immediate branching to a new location back up in the code structure (bad!) or further down the code structure. Branching can only occur within the current function and not between functions.

For example

     start:  if (i==0) goto finish;
             more lines of bad coding
             --a;
             goto start;
     finish:

As can easily be seen in the above example the use of the goto statement can be avoided by using other block structure constructs, for example the while loop. The goto statement should only be used in the last resort!

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Last Updated: August 1995