Structured programming is frequently misunderstood to be a practice of writing software devoid of GOTO statements. The object of applying structured programming techniques is to produce code which is well-documented, less prone to side-effects, easy to maintain and generally flexible. These are virtues that a large piece of software must possess before I would be happy with it, but a small piece of software should still be well-written.

Structured techniques can be applied to software targeted for Assembler as well as 'structured' high-level languages e.g. Pascal. So the banner of 'GOTO-less' programming is a nonsense.

Finally, all that structured techniques do is to provide programmers with a better idea of what they're trying to program. This understanding produces programs that work and continue to work.

J. Kramer
New Southgate, London