Unstructured programming

Unstructured programming is a programming paradigm where all code is contained in a single continuous block. This is contrary to structured programming, where programmatic tasks are split into smaller sections (known as functions or subroutines) that can be called whenever they are required. Unstructured programming languages have to rely on execution flow statements such as Goto, used in many languages to jump to a specified section of code.

Unstructured source code is notoriously difficult to read and debug, and so is discouraged in programming languages that support any kind of structure. It is not needed in any programming language since program structures can always be implemented by a combination of conditional statements and GO TO statements. However it is still used in some scripting languages such as MS-DOS batch files, older programming languages such as BASIC, FORTRAN and C, and for programming CPU intensive algorithms in C or Assembly language, where processing speed is more important than readability.

See also