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structured programming
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Structured programming is a way of writing computer code that uses organized control structures (like loops and conditional statements) to make programs easier to understand and maintain. It matters because this organized approach helps programmers write better code more quickly and with fewer errors.
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Encyclopedic overview
Structured programming is a programming paradigm characterized by source code that uses block-based source code structure to encode control flow such as sequence, selection (i.e. if-then-else and switch) and iteration (i.e. for and while).
Originally, the central goal of the structured programming movement was to eliminate the need for and use of the goto statement. As goto provides powerful and flexible flow control, it can be used to write any arbitrarily complex algorithm, but the resulting code often has significant quality issues, commonly described as spaghetti code. Structured programming replaces goto with constructs that tend to result in better code. The paradigm became popular and for the most part achieved the goal of supplanting goto. In fact, its ubiquity is so thorough that for much of software development, it is simply the way code is written, no longer a topic of discussion as it once was.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “structured programming” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.