goto? go where?

Understanding goto statements in C++

This medium-difficulty C++ language-knowledge question tests your grasp of control flow and, specifically, how the goto statement behaves in practice. While rarely used in production code, understanding goto is valuable for reading legacy systems and for demonstrating mastery of language semantics in interviews.

The question asks you to trace execution through a code snippet containing goto jumps. Success requires you to mentally follow the program counter as it jumps to labels, understand scope and initialization rules at the jump destination, and predict the output accurately. These skills matter because they reveal whether you truly understand how the compiler translates control flow, not just the high-level intent of more familiar constructs like loops and conditionals.

• Label scope and visibility
• Forward and backward jumps
• Variable initialization semantics across goto boundaries
• Interaction with local scope and stack unwinding