Well, if you think that loop is scary, have you ever seen Duff's device? http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html.

And of course, something like that can be ported to Perl:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $n = shift;
    my $m = int (($n + 7) / 8);

    goto L . ($n & 7);

    L0: do { print "zero\n";
    L1:      print "one\n";
    L2:      print "two\n";
    L3:      print "three\n";
    L4:      print "four\n";
    L5:      print "five\n";
    L6:      print "six\n";
    L7:      print "seven\n"; } while -- $m > 0;
[download]

I'd love to be able to put something like that in a piece of production code.

Abigail