First Class Goto

Oort is an experimental programming language I have been working on, on and off (mostly off), since 2007. It is a statically typed, object-oriented, imperative language, where classes, functions and methods can be nested arbitrarily, and where functions and methods are full closures, ie., they can be stored in variables and returned from functions. The control structures are the usual ones: if, for, while, do, goto, etc. It also has an unusual feature: goto labels are first class. What does it mean for labels to be first class? It means two things: (1) they are lexically scoped so that they are visible from inside nested functions. This makes it possible to jump from any point in the program to any other location that is visible from that point, even if that location is in another function. And (2) labels can be used as values: They can be passed to and returned from functions and methods, and they can be stored in data structures. As a simple example, consider a data structure with a…