Goto or not to go?

Goto is a very controversial programming statement. When discussing goto, some programmers talk about "spaghetti code" and think of BASIC, others answer with "performance" and think of C.

I'm one of the latter guys. My attitude to coding is, the coder should be able to decide what's the best way (in any means) to achieve the development goals.

Okay, there are only few good reasons to use the goto statement. Actually I can think of only one good reason: leaving a function at its end and place a generic cleanup there ("single point of exit").

Example:

function foo(){
  if( $error1 ){
    echo( 'error condition 1' );
    goto cleanup_and_leave;
  }
 
  if( $error2 ){
    echo( 'error condition 2' );
    goto cleanup_and_leave;
  }
 
  cleanup_and_leave:
  // * (do the usual cleanup here)
 
  return;
}

At the asterisk the code may fulfill tasks of any complexity for purposes like cleanup, preparing return values or whatever has to be done on each return.

The great advantage is we have build a single point of exit. The structure of our code therefore has become much clearer than with nested conditions (if{if{if{if{/*vomit*/}}}}) or several return statements.

Bridge to PHP

PHP is a real spaghetti language by nature. Implicit variable declaration, dynamic typing, lots of hard to handle dynamics. It's hard to understand why the goto statement was just introduced with version 5.3, I would have expected it in version 0.1 beta! Perhaps it's because PHP coders are rather unexperienced and would abuse goto.

So yes, PHP 5.3 and later know the goto statement and accept it like shown in the above code. And to avoid spaghetti-like usage, there is a limitation to goto that's not present in C or BASIC: "It is not allowed to jump into loop or switch statement. Fatal error is issued in such case." (quote of docs at PHP.net)

Well I feel fine with all that! PHP rulez (more and more).