A control statement for natural top-down structured programming

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion concerned with the advantages of a top-down structured style of programming and the question of whether or not to banish the goto control statement. The most compelling arguments for the retention of goto have referred to common programming situations where the absence of goto causes some awkwardness in the programming task or loss of efficiency for the running program. We propose a new control statement which alleviates many of these known difficulties while maintaining the philosophy of structured control. The new statement is well-matched to top-down programming and in some respects allows program modifications to be performed more easily.

[1]  C. A. R. Hoare,et al.  Algorithm 64: Quicksort , 1961, Commun. ACM.

[2]  C. A. R. Hoare,et al.  Algorithm 65: find , 1961, Commun. ACM.

[3]  E. Lohse,et al.  A Correspondence Between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda- Notation: Part I* , 1965 .

[4]  P. J. Landin,et al.  Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation , 1965, Commun. ACM.

[5]  Niklaus Wirth On certain basic concepts of programming languages , 1967 .

[6]  Edsger W. Dijkstra,et al.  Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful , 1968, CACM.

[7]  Edsger W. Dijkstra,et al.  Notes on structured programming , 1970 .

[8]  William A. Wulf,et al.  Programming without the Goto , 1971, IFIP Congress.

[9]  William A. Wulf,et al.  BLISS: a language for systems programming , 1971, CACM.

[10]  Edsger Wybe Dijkstra,et al.  Ewd 316: a short introduction to the art of programming , 1971 .

[11]  Robert W. Floyd,et al.  Notes on Avoiding "go to" Statements , 1971, Information Processing Letters.

[12]  Martin E. Hopkins,et al.  A case for the GOTO , 1972, ACM '72.

[13]  B. M. Leavenworth,et al.  Programming with(out) the GOTO , 1972, SIGP.

[14]  William A. Wulf,et al.  A case against the GOTO , 1972, ACM '72.

[15]  Eberhard Wegner,et al.  Tree-structured programs , 1973, CACM.

[16]  Gregor von Bochmann,et al.  Multiple exits from a loop without the GOTO , 1973, Commun. ACM.

[17]  Donald E. Knuth,et al.  A review of Structured Programming. , 1973 .

[18]  Barbara Liskov,et al.  Report of session on structured programming , 1973 .