> but never had any need to use it.

In most cases it's used in combination with AUTOLOAD because after delegating the call you don't want to return to the AUTOLOAD routine, hence a call frame must be skipped.

Some use it to implement continuations or coroutines, but it's not very performant compared to languages like LISP.

Similarly you can implement case/switch mechanism using it with named subroutines instead of labels, but without much of a spead gain compared to a classical dispatch table.

Edit

The author in question is implementing a state machine via dispatch tables and doesn't want the call stack to fill up with every state switch.

He could also have used classic goto LABLE; , but (obviously) using subs gives him more flexibility in maintenance than spaghetti code would.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^2: Weird syntax. What does this goto statement do? ( 'goto &NAME' use cases) by LanX
in thread Weird syntax. What does this goto statement do? by harangzsolt33

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