IT lexicon Programming Structured programming

Structured programming

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-07-29

The idea that all program logic can be built from three constructs — sequence, selection and iteration — and that goto is therefore unnecessary. Dijkstra's letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (1968) became the slogan.

Böhm and Jacopini had already proved in 1966 that the three constructs suffice for any computation. The argument was practical rather than theoretical: with arbitrary jumps you cannot reason about what is true at a given point in the code, because you might have arrived there from anywhere. The debate raged for a decade — Knuth wrote the nuanced "Structured Programming with go to Statements" in 1974 — but was settled by languages simply ceasing to offer the alternative. Today it's so obvious the term is barely used, though the remnants remain: break, continue, early return and goto cleanup in C are all controlled jumps.

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