Were structured programming techniques helpful in the past?

Answer 1

Yes. Indeed, structure is still used today.

Consider the following unstructured program written in BASIC:

1. let i = 0

2. print "Hello world"

3. i = i + 1

4. if i<=10 then goto 2

In structured version of BASIC, this same code would be written:

1. for i = 1 to 10

2. print "hello world"

3. next i

Note that in the structured version we do not need line numbers since we never refer to them in the code. Also, in the structured version, the first line introduces a counted loop up front whereas the unstructured version requires that we read all of the code before we finally realise there is actually a loop in the code. Thus the structured version is said to be more readable because the logic is more obvious to the reader.