note 101171 deleted from control-structures.goto by danbrown

Note Submitter: mewsterus at gmail dot com ---- @tweston: Your code actually mimics a do {} while loop, not a plain while {} loop. This is what you were looking for: <?php $start = microtime(true); $i = 0; StartOfLoop: if(!($i < 1000000)) goto EndOfLoop; $i++; goto StartOfLoop; EndOfLoop: echo microtime(true) - $start.PHP_EOL; ?> And of course it's as fast as a while loop. It might even be faster. Every single control structure except for the basic "if" (even "else") is ultimately implemented as GOTO statements. PHP probably doesn't do this, it probably passes the control structures onto C, but the C compiler translates all of the control statements to GOTO statements. The reason it is bad coding practice to do this manually is because while a compiler only has to define the labels once and stick with it, as humans writing ever-changing computer code, we will make mistakes in the future when modifying the code. It's less likely we'll make a mistake with well-defined control structures than with GOTO statements, especially with the older languages and machine code where it might be defined as a code offset rather than a label.