To use goto or not?

Question

This question may sound cliched, but I am in a situation here.

I am trying to implement a finite state automaton to parse a certain string in C. As I started writin

Answer 1

I'd use a FSM generator, like Ragel, if I wanted to leave a good impression on my boss.

The main benefit of this approach is that you are able to describe your state machine at a higher level of abstraction and don't need to concern yourself of whether to use goto or a switch. Not to mention in the particular case of Ragel that you can automatically get pretty diagrams of your FSM, insert actions at any point, automatically minimize the amount of states and various other benefits. Did I mention that the generated FSMs are also very fast?

The drawbacks are that they're harder to debug (automatic visualization helps a lot here) and that you need to learn a new tool (which is probably not worth it if you have a simple machine and you are not likely to write machines frequently.)