A Programming Foundation: Structured Programming

The term "structured programming" originated in a landmark paper, "Structured Programming," presented by Edsger Dijkstra at the 1969 NATO conference on software engineering (Dijkstra 1969). By the time structured programming came and went, the term "structured" had been applied to every software-development activity, including structured analysis, structured design, and structured goofing off. The various structured methodologies weren't joined by any common thread except that they were all created at a time when the word "structured" gave them extra cachet.

The core of structured programming is the simple idea that a program should use only one-in, one-out control constructs (also called single-entry, ...

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