flowcharts and teaching programming/was Re: Barden programming books

Those who are familiar with JSP (Jackson Structured Programming) will know that GO To's are acceptable and also necessary.? There are occasions where a Go To is a better way of terminating a program on a fatal error for example.??? I've seen some really bad so called "structured code" so it isn't just having a program use structured statements that makes it a good program.? In the early days (1960's) there was a lot of bad coding done making it difficult to maintain the code due to poor general structure and the use of wild Go To's.? We as COBOL programmers recognized that fact and would always have any Go To's branch to an Exit Paragraph and always down the program and never back. Old conventional flow charting techniques should be avoided in trying to write structured code as a lot of better techniques have become available.? Even in the 70's I used decision tables for complex logic issues and I think I stopped using flow charts around 1970. As a final foot note during my programming years I've had to maintain many programs.? Maintainability is key.? I've changed programs that used Go To's and they were a joy to change.? I've also maintained some structured programs that were the total opposite.? Russ --- On Fri, 2/26/10, Murray McCullough <c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com> wrote: From: Murray McCullough <c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com> Subject: Re: flowcharts and teaching programming/was Re: Barden programming books To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Date: Friday, February 26, 2010, 5:51 PM I began programming IBM, CDC and Amdahl machines in June 1970. All assignments at the Computer Institute of Canada were graded according to the accuracy of the flowchart and the initial box as Chuck states. COBOL and other languages employed at that time employed gotos; it was a sign of sloppy programming according to purists and professors/instructors but gotos usually solved complex junction problems in an elegant fashion. BASIC and 'Small-C' used them to the same effect in the microcomputer world of late 70s. Early programming books are getting scarce yet magazines of that era had programming projects and got many of us interested in advanced programming versus machine-language programming; it beat flipping switches and assembler programming of early to mid-70s machines! Murray--