GOTO considered (a necessary) evil?

We were reviewing the following code for part of a membership site I've been working on when another developer pointed out that I used a goto and this was evil. The code is:

RE_TIE: eval {
    tie %session, 'Apache::Session::MySQL', $session, {
        Handle => HH::DB->db_Main, LockHandle => HH::DB->db_Main
    }
};

if ($@) {
    if ($@ =~ /^Object does not exist/) {
        $session = undef;
        goto RE_TIE;
    } else {
        print $cgi->header;
        die_nice('Database Error', 'Unable to connect at this time');
    }
}
[download]

The goto is to handle a "shouldn't really happen" case (somebody sending us a session id which is invalid). I like the use of goto because it doesn't distract from the "normal" case which a loop would. He suggested:

my $tied = 0;
while (!$tied) {
    eval {
        tie %session, 'Apache::Session::MySQL', $session, {
        Handle => HH::DB->db_Main, LockHandle => HH::DB->db_Main
    };
    if ($@) {
        if ($@ =~ /^Object does not exist/) {
            $session = undef;
        } else {
            print $cgi->header;
            die_nice('Database Error', 'Unable to connect at this time
+');
          }
    } else {
        $tied = 1;
    }
}
[download]

Personally I think this is harder to read and it makes you read through to work out how the loop is exited.

I was wondering what the general consensus here was, is goto (in this case) really evil?

gav^

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