Jump to content

Unstructured programming

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Bitplane (talk | contribs) at 12:30, 20 July 2004 (afaik think this is right... additions/comments anyone?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Unstructured programming is a programming paradigm where all code is contained in a single continuous block. This is contrary to structured programming, where programatic tasks can be split in to smaller sections known as functions or subroutines, which 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 notouriously difficult to read and debug, and so is discoraged in programming languages that support any kind of structure. However, unstructured programming is still needed in some scripting languages such as MS-DOS batch files, and for programming CPU intensive algorithms in C or Assembly language, where processing speed is more important than readability.