goto
goto
[Sideways view of Cueball sitting at computer, thinking.] Cueball: I could restructure the program's flow - or use one little 'GOTO' instead. Cueball: Eh, screw good practice. How bad can it be? Text on computer: goto main_sub3; *Compile* [We now have a view from behind Cueball. Cueball looks at the computer.] [A raptor jumps into the panel, pushing Cueball off his chair.]

Goto is a construct found in many computer languages that causes control flow to go from one place in a program to another, without returning. Once common in computer programming, its popularity diminished in the 1960s and 1970s as focus on structured programming became the norm. Edsger W. Dijkstra 's article "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" in particular contributed to the decline of goto.
Often, people learning programming are told that goto is bad and should be avoided, but frequently, they are not given a good reason. Cueball , as one of these people, sees no harm in using goto to avoid rewriting much of his program, most likely written in the C programming language. As a result, he is attacked by a velociraptor . Velociraptor attacks are a running joke (and fear) often expressed in xkcd .
The name main_sub3 of the goto destination also shows bad programming style: it is an unmeaningful name suggesting that at least two similarly unmeaningful names are used for other goto marks and it is contradictory in that a chunk of code can either belong to the main program or to a subroutine, but not both.
The title text refers to Neal Stephenson , an author of cyberpunk novels. A label is used in many programming languages to refer to a point in a program that a goto instruction can jump to. The joke is that one of Stephenson's characters in Cryptonomicon is named Goto Dengo. When said out loud, "Dengo" sounds like "Then go."
[Sideways view of Cueball sitting at computer, thinking.] Cueball: I could restructure the program's flow - or use one little 'GOTO' instead. Cueball: Eh, screw good practice. How bad can it be? Text on computer: goto main_sub3; *Compile* [We now have a view from behind Cueball. Cueball looks at the computer.] [A raptor jumps into the panel, pushing Cueball off his chair.]
