Structured programming
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Chunk structure is a proposed extension of structured programming methods that would enable the programmer to code in terms of abstract data and to construct and debug data structures top-downwards as a normal part of program development. The chunk structure of a program is determined by the chunk tree expressed in the program code. A chunk tree is a tree whose terminal nodes declare data elements, as provided by the particular programming language, and whose intermediate nodes are meaningful names that functionally describe the data given by its subtrees. Individual program modules might reference and use both concrete data, represented by terminal nodes of the chunk tree, and abstract data, represented by intermediate nodes of the chunk tree. The programmer using chunk structure always works within a small data environment. This makes it easier to write correct code and to desk-check and debug code. Because chunk-structured code provides syntactic identification for localities of data reference, a language processor can operate in linear time without incurring the space cost of hash tables and can grow dynamically during processing without incurring the time cost of balanced trees.