I helped develop the first ANSI Standard COBOL compiler. For our celebration upon its release, we collaborated on “The Ode to ANSI COBOL”. The other verses were forgettable but mine was:
We have a compiler called ANSI,
with features considered quite fancy.
The SORT verb works fine
and the SEARCH is sublime
but a GO TO is still rather chancy.
At the time there had been a letter to the editor of a computer journal that said the GO TO verb in various languages was considered dangerous because it led to very poorly organized code.