Is there a goto like there is in BASIC?

[micseydel]

There are certain things that recursion does that I can't really imagine doing any other way.

Anything recursive can be written in an iterative fashion. You might have to manage a stack manually, but it's always doable.

While I believe "indirect" (or "mutual") recursion is playing with fire, and I regret deeply the one time I tried it, "direct" or regular recursion has a learning curve to it but is arguably better than using break or continue in a loop. CPython lacks optimizations for recursion, but as a style of control flow it can be an elegant way to avoid side effects.