The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

7.9 Spaghetti Code

One major problem with assembly language is that it takes several statements to realize a simple idea encapsulated by a single high-level language statement. All too often an assembly language programmer will notice that she or he can save a few bytes or cycles by jumping into the middle of some program structure. After a few such observations (and corresponding modifications) the code contains a whole sequence of jumps in and out of portions of the code. If you were to draw a line from each jump to its destination, the resulting listing would end up looking like someone dumped a bowl of spaghetti on your code, hence the term spaghetti code.

Spaghetti code suffers from one major drawback—it's difficult (at best) to read such ...