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Structured Programming, its Advantages and Disadvantages

In this article we are going to study about What is Structured Programming? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages? How to implement structured programming? What is functional abstraction?
Submitted by Amit Shukla, on September 25, 2017

Structured programming

In structured programming design, programs are broken into different functions these functions are also known as modules, subprogram, subroutines and procedures.

Each function is design to do a specific task with its own data and logic. Information can be passed from one function to another function through parameters. A function can have local data that cannot be accessed outside the function’s scope. The result of this process is that all the other different functions are synthesized in an another function. This function is known as main function. Many of the high level languages supported structure programming.

Structured programming minimized the chances of the function affecting another. It supported to write clearer programs. It made global variables to disappear and replaced by the local variables. Due to this change one can save the memory allocation space occupied by the global variable. Its organization helped to understand the programming logic easily. So that one can easily understand the logic behind the programs. It also helps the new comers of any industrial technology company to understand the programs created by their senior workers of the industry. It also made debugging easier.

Functional abstraction was introduced with structured programming. Abstraction simply means that how able one can or we can say that it means the ability to look at something without knowing about its inner details. In structured programming, it is important to know that a given function satisfies its requirement and performs a specific task. Weather How that task is performed is not important.

Advantages of structured programming

The following are the different advantages of structured programming

1. It is user friendly and easy to understand.
2. Similar to English vocabulary of words and symbols.
3. It is easier to learn.
4. They require less time to write.
5. They are easier to maintain.
6. These are mainly problem oriented rather than machine based.
7. Program written in a higher level language can be translated into many machine languages and therefore can run on any computer for which there exists an appropriate translator.
8. It is independent of machine on which it is used i.e. programs developed in high level languages can be run on any computer.

Disadvantages of structured programming

The following are the disadvantages of structured programming:

1. A high level language has to be translated into the machine language by translator and thus a price in computer time is paid.
2. The object code generated by a translator might be inefficient compared to an equivalent assembly language program.
3. Data type are proceeds in many functions in a structured program. When changes occur in those data types, the corresponding change must be made to every location that acts on those data types within the program. This is really a very time consuming task if the program is very large.
4. Let us consider the case of software development in which several programmers work as a team on an application. In a structured program, each programmer is assigned to build a specific set of functions and data types. Since different programmers handle separate functions that have mutually shared data type. Other programmers in the team must reflect the changes in data types done by the programmer in data type handled. Otherwise, it requires rewriting several functions.