in reply to organizing program structure

You must have misheard. Look at some perl libraries or the scripts in the tutorial section of this site. You will find lots of subroutines.

There is a general "hatred" of goto, yes. But advice to not use goto was already voiced more than 20 years ago when bad programming style was prevalent in the old programming language BASIC. No matter what language you will use (except for machine language) you will get warned about using goto. goto was the first symbol of bad programming and it still is an (almost sure) sign for bad code

But that has nothing to do with subroutines. We love subroutines. Subroutines are your first line of defense against unmanagable unreadable code

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Re^2: organizing program structure
by JavaFan (Canon) on Jul 22, 2010 at 22:20 UTC
    But advice to not use goto was already voiced more than 20 years ago when bad programming style was prevalent in the old programming language BASIC.
    One of the earliest "warnings" against the use of goto is Dijkstra's letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful (the title is by Niklaus Wirth, the editor of Communications of the ACM at the time - CACM is journal that printed Dijkstra's letter), published, IIRC, in 1968.

    Dijkstra's argument was that most uses of goto makes it impossible to do structured programming. Note also that Dijkstra would make the same objections against constructs we all love: return, last, redo, next, eval. Just like goto, they allow blocks to have more than one exit point.

    But that has nothing to do with subroutines.
    Well, if I weren't able to use subroutines, I'd probably use goto a lot more than I do now.
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