I would argue that the C for loop is a rather awkward construct. It's found its way in many languages, so I think most people are used to its idiosyncrasy but it's not great if you try to take a fresh look at it.

I think the best defense of this syntax is that it makes writing basic iteration a bit nicer without having to add boilerplate (the iconic `for (i = 0; i < n; i++)`) but then I would argue that the real problem is that C is severely lacking in the iteration department and this is a rather obvious hack (that languages like Javascript felt the need to copy wholesale, for some insane reason).

The nonlocality can be eliminated by replacing the `guard {}` block with a `resolve;` statement to be placed at the end of a block containing multiple `defer`s. This also reduces nesting and solves the question of where the `defer` is executed and makes it easy to grep to the location where the `defer` statement will be executed. Of course, it would be a syntax error to use `defer` without a following `resolve;`.