Modern goto
Stewart D. Smith, Nicholas Zemljic, Andrew K. Petersen · 2015
While many programmers would agree that unrestricted use of goto and similar structures is undesirable, modern languages still provide statements that support non-standard control flow: structures that do not obey the guidelines of structured programming. Novice programmers who have not been exposed to the arguments for and against the use of these structures may find them tempting -- or even natural -- when struggling to solve problems. We analyze a large-scale repository of novice programmer source code and find that 7% of the solutions in our set use non-standard control structures. While many of these uses are ineffective, some students use non-standard control to simplify their code.