The goto-LABEL
form finds the statement labeled with LABEL and resumes execution there. It may not be used to go into any construct that requires initialization, such as a subroutine or a foreach
loop. It also can't be used to go into a construct that is optimized away, or to get out of a block or subroutine given to sort()
. It can be used to go almost anywhere else within the dynamic scope, including out of subroutines, but it's usually better to use some other construct such as last
or die()
. The author of Perl has never felt the need to use this form of goto
(in Perl, that is--C is another matter).
The goto-EXPR
form expects a label name, whose scope will be resolved dynamically. This allows for computed goto
s per FORTRAN, but isn't necessarily recommended if you're optimizing for maintainability:
goto ("FOO", "BAR", "GLARCH")[$i];
The goto-&NAME
form is highly magical, and substitutes a call to the named subroutine for the currently running subroutine. This is used by AUTOLOAD
subroutines that wish to load another subroutine and then pretend that the other subroutine had been called in the first place (except that any modifications to @_
in the current subroutine are propagated to the other subroutine.) After the goto
, not even caller()
will be able to tell that this routine was called first.