And thankfully, Perl provides us with a rich set of loop control and program flow features which help us to write more structured programs, and hence avoid bouncing all over the place with goto's.

What is a next/last but a goto? In fact, next LABEL; or last LABEL; are both gotos without much of a disguise. The only constraint upon them is that the label must be on a loop enclosing the next/last statement. next/last will even work within a subroutine.

use strict;
use warnings;

sub foo {
    next LOOP;
}

LOOP: for ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    if ( $_ < 5 ) {
        foo();
    }
    print "$_\n";
}
----
Exiting subroutine via next at ./test.pl line 7.
Exiting subroutine via next at ./test.pl line 7.
Exiting subroutine via next at ./test.pl line 7.
Exiting subroutine via next at ./test.pl line 7.
5
6
7
8
9
10
[download]

Yes, a warning is thrown, but the code still works as expected.

As for a goto being an indication of flawed program logic, that's completely and utterly not true. Why do you use next/last? Here's an example:

while ( <FH> ) {
    next unless length; # Skip blank lines
    next if /^#/;       # Skip comments
    next if /\bSKIP\b/; # Skip lines that want to be skipped

    # Do something useful here
}
[download]

Pretty easy to understand, right? Let's see what happens if next/last are disallowed because they're goto in disguise . . .

while ( <FH> ) {
    if ( length ) {
        if ( !/^#/ ) {
            if ( !/\bSKIP\b/ ) {
                # Do something useful here
            }
        }
    }
}
[download]

I hope the point is made.

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