With all of the recent talk about GOTO in PHP 5.3, there's been a lot of comments, both positive and negative, about the functionality and the PHP development group's choice to include it. This new article from ZDNet (Australia) looks at the debate that's been going on and provides a more "clueful" perspective.

Few things can spark more religious fervour amongst programmers than the mention of a goto statement. PHP has stepped into the middle of the firefight by announcing that it will be implementing goto functionality in version 5.3. [...] By going against the goto grain, PHP is challenging a tenet upon which the foundation of modern programming is built. [...] Here's a shock for the young, blindly-accepting-articles-of-faith type of programmer that has never had to use a goto: most high-level languages implement a form of goto, you just know them as break, switch and continue.

He agrees with most of the masses that, in the wrong hands (or in the hands of an inexperienced programmer), it could result in some truly horrific code. For some, however, its the open door they've been looking for - jumping out of structures so deep in logic that getting back out has been a major struggle.