What is the Difference between modular programming and structured programming?

Answer 1

Event driven programming is just that, the code does not get executed until an event happens. A good example is a visual basic program, when you click on a button, the code for the button gets executed, but in any other case that code is never touched by the program.

Structured programming is different, A DOS programming environment called QBasic is a great example of this. You write a program and it goes through every single line of code before either looping back to the beginning or exiting. when it gets to the end, it checks to see if a variable contains a certain value, if it does it exits, otherwise it loops.

Hope this helps, and my definitions of each are accurate.

Answer 2

Modular program simply means dividing a program into logical units to reduce the maintenance burden and provide greater consistency. There are various ways to achieve this depending on the programming language. In C we typically use headers to group related declarations (interfaces) which can then be included wholesale wherever they are required, with corresponding source files to define the implementation of those interfaces. Each source file is essentially a translation unit that is compiled in complete isolation from all others. In C++ we can also group or divide translation units into namespaces. For example, the entire C++ standard library is defined across hundreds of individual source files, all of which are contained in the std namespace. Namespaces can also be nested to create further division and we can import just those names we actually require, reducing pollution of the global namespace.

Structured programming addresses the problems associated with "spaghetti code" (overuse of goto statements) which can make code difficult to read and thus increases the maintenance burden. Structured programming primarily introduced the concepts of structured loops (such as while and do-while loops), code blocks (scope), subroutines and exception handling. Structured programming eventually gave way to procedural programming which introduced the concept of a unified function call-and-return mechanism. This in turn led to object-oriented programming (OOP) which combines abstraction, data encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. In essence, all OOP languages are procedural and all procedural languages are structured, all of which play some part in creating code that is modular, easy to read and thus easier to maintain.