In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don’t have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don’t even have a goto statement anymore.
Following that logic
if,elseandwhileare also “pseudo goto” statements.There’s nothing wrong with conditional jumps - we couldn’t program without them. The problem with goto specifically is that you can goto “anywhere”.
If pretty much gets compiled to a goto statement. Well more a jumpif but same principle