PHP will never fully be utilized as an OO language by the vast majority of its user base due to its syntactically terrible standard library and history as a functional language.
1) its only a step backwards if you're currently using a better language. its a step forward for other people who are way behind, or for people who have no web development experience and want to get started. it a decent and very popular learning language. if someone starts writing about goto in their php tutorials for beginners, we'll have a problem.
2) php is procedural, not functional. (edit: whoops, beaten to this punch)
I almost agree with this. I'm experimenting with Kohana for my latest code, and even though this is supposed to be the lean, fast OO framework, there's a LOT of boilerplate associated. Less than a third of my code is actually get-things-done code, as opposed to more than two thirds last time I was using a home-grown, not-especially-OO framework.
Maybe some other framework does this better, though.
Now that I come to think of it, it actually doesn't matter for PHP.
While loops limit the scope of variables inside the loop. For C++, that means a variable declared inside cannot be used outside - logical, and OOP.
But PHP has no concept of privacy or scope, even its "rules" may be broken (though not guaranteed to always work) and come out with the right results. Anything will compile, and usually the results are as expected.
So if you have a while loop with no concept of scope or local variables, I guess the restrictions are gone. A number of nested loops with breaks; and continues; all over end so long as the concept of limited data scope/access is not present as in PHP are exactly equivalent to goto as it is.
I guess a language as, shall we say, 'relaxed' as PHP is well-matched with relaxed keywords like goto.
