Thank you for the recommendation; that was a very interesting read. I find that I can't quite agree with the last "nontrivial goto" example, though. This version without explicit gotos is actually shorter, and IMHO not really any more difficult to follow:

    int parse(void)
    {   
      Token tok;
      while ((tok = gettoken()) != END)
      {   
        while (!shift(tok))
          if (!reduce(tok))
            return ERROR;
      }
      return ACCEPT;
    }

I will say that any language without goto, or where the use of goto is discouraged, should at least provide guaranteed tail-call elimination as an alternative. In this case the gotos could easily be converted into loops, but not every algorithm is so accommodating.

Not using it can also create spaghetti code. For example the "alternatives" often suggesting for exiting a multi-tiered loop (which often add additional boilerplate, additional variables, etc that all need to be maintained/bug free).

[RAII](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/raii) to the rescue..