Seriously?

Oh! I found it: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

I also was a kid that learned with Basic (Spectrum Basic, later GW/Quick/Visual Basic and even CA-Realizer), and I don't feel mutilated at all...

And yes, the goto to the end was a very nice pattern to do the cleanup of errors. Lot cleaner than nested try/catches.