On 2017-12-30 11:07:56 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 13:46:14 +0100, "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at> > declaimed the following: > > >I don't think this is correct. Structured programming is much older: > >ALGOL 60 was already a block structured language and Dijkstra wrote > >"goto considered harmful" in the late 1960s. Pascal appeared in 1970, C > >in 1974. To me (who learned to program in BASIC on a CP/M machine), C > >is very much a structured programming language. If structured > >programming gained traction around 1980, it might even have been because > >structured languages like C with good performance became widely > >available. > > > There is a slight difference between just being block structured and > full structured programming (at the time "one-entry/one-exit per > construct".
I'd say there is a rather big difference: One is a programming paradigm,
the other a syntactic aid for the former. You can do structured
programming in assembler (I did in BASIC), but it is a lot easier and
natural in a block-structured language. I wasn't present when ALGOL was
invented (I wasn't even born then), but I am sure that the inventors
shared much of the mindset of "structured programming" (although the
name may not yet have been invented).
> Even Pascal still had a GOTO statement,
Yes. I don't know any language which enforces "pure" structured
programming. They all have some constructs (goto, break, return,
exceptions, ...) to leave a block early. I don't think that invalidates
my point that the concept of structured programming predates Pascal.
> and flow-charts were still part of documentation at school.
We learned about them in the 80's, too (along with Nassi-Shneiderman
diagrams). And in fact I still use them sometimes (although more
frequently to document processes for humans than for computers).
(I don't use NS diagrams at all anymore: They have no advantages over
pseudo code for me.)
> The /teaching/ of structured programming as a discipline didn't really
> show up until my final year in college (79-80) and the first few years at
> Lockheed
I can't comment on how wide-spread teaching of structured programming
was, since I am too young. But since Pascal was explicitely intended as
a teaching language for structured programming, there must have been at
least a few professors to teach it in the late 1960's.
> -- which was also a time period when such abominations as TEXTFOR,
> MORTRAN, and RATFOR were created to allow for doing structured programming
> in FORTRAN-IV
And regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of these preprocessors
I'd argue that they were created (and used) because at the time many
programmers thought that structured programming was a good idea.
Is there any mainstream (procedural) computer language invented after
1970 which doesn't try to encourage structured programming?
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) | | because we have much more sophisticated
| | | h...@hjp.at | management tools.
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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