Loop exits and structured programming: reopening the debate
SIGCSE '95 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Structured Programming with go to Statements
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Certification of algorithm 245 [M1]:treesort 3:proof of algorithms—a new kind of certification
Communications of the ACM
Oh! Pascal!
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Until recently, Pascal was the first programming language taught to students. As more schools choose Ada or C++ as a first language, the debate on structured programming has been reopened ([Rob95]). We are no longer restricted to the while-statement: exit/break-statements can be used to exit a loop from the middle, and return from a procedure or function is allowed within a loop statement. Do these constructs violate the principle of structure programming? This article claims that more general loop constructs can be objectively justified, because they simplify the verification of programs. A program that is simple to verify is also easy to explain and understand.