I sympathized with the "yow" remark because it looked like the difference between finding the label and not finding the label was whether "return" was used. But that was a red herring.

The real difference is whether the one-liner ends with "G" or with "F". The inclusion of the 'return' keyword makes no difference (but lacking the 'return' when calling "F" makes the reason for the output less obvious).

Once I noticed the single-character difference off at the end of the long lines, then I lost sympathy for a "yow" response because the behavior is exactly as I would have expected from the documentation. And, it seems a reasonable restriction.

Now, I think using 'goto' to leave a subroutine is a rather squirrely technique. I would much prefer that it produced a warning so you'd have to write such squirrely code more like:

sub F {
    return G();
    LF: say 6;
}
sub G {
    say 2;
    no warnings 'exiting';
    goto LF;
}
G();
[download]

Indeed, I'm not sure why the -w you used fails to trigger this:

=item Exiting subroutine via %s

(W exiting) You are exiting a subroutine by unconventional
means, such as a goto, or a loop control statement.
[download]

> Now, I think using goto to leave a subroutine is a rather squirrely technique.

It's a way to directly break out of a deep recursion.

my $counter;

sub rec {
  goto OUT if $counter++ >= 10;
  print $counter;
  rec();
  # never reached
}

rec();
OUT:
[download]

This can be handy to avoid the code-block after a recursive call w/o needing to check a status-flag.

Cheers Rolf

I didn't say it should be disallowed. I said it is squirrely. In particular, it is easy to see doing this by accident. So it is appropriate to issue a warning which even provides the opportunity to add a line indicating "yes, I really did intentionally use 'goto' to exit this subroutine".

And die is a less squirrely way to unwind a stack.

- tye        

Well return traditionally exits a subroutine, so the say wasn't supposed to happen without the goto

Good idea about the warning

> goto says that literally

Really? Where?

And I hate the fact that it uses the term "construct" in two different meanings!!!

I'd really love to have the $cash to hire a crowd of math students to look thru the perldocs to clean up the wording.

:) In the docs, in goto, in the part i quoted, the part in bold, the part that says: any construct that requires initialization, such as a subroutine or a foreach loop.

Constructs that require initialization such as a subroutine or a foreach loop can't be deprecated now because they never worked.

Moritz showed a jump into a "construct" (an if block) w/o deprecation warning.

So which blocks or "pieces of syntax made up of smaller pieces" exactly do belong to that set of now deprecated "constructs" is not defined within the perldocs.

I hope you are aware that many kinds of loops are not foreach -loops.

Cheers Rolf