Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1398

it's called "Structured Programming" and the short version is it makes for ***much*** more maintainable code in applications programming. Instead of 10% of your time developing code and 90% patching it up so it might make it through testing, you spend 90% writing and 10% debugging (mostly typose).

The long version is the same as the short version...

If two "black belts" use the same S-P methodology then their flowcharts for the exact same program will look *exactly* the same. As you can imagine this comes in pretty handy on anything over a couple thousand lines. If you combine that with departmental naming standards then the source code will be identical, too. (I'm referring specifically to a JSP-COBOL sheaf of problemsets, you Yourdonites take way too many

Not particularly directly applicable to anything that has to be written bottom-up though (though I imagine there are definitive techniques for that as well (Dykstra?) and I'm sure there's overlap)

Think of it as an uber-algorithm.

Anyways, if it was COBOL (anytime after '68 I think) then those were PERFORM statements not CALLS (internal flow control, no parameter pbutting). Though if subroutines are calling a mainline paragraph then that's just wrong (possible exception of bane-error handling; even then it's sloppy).

Oh, btw, code reuse makes for less swapping as well as "one-stop shopping" writing-debugging-maintenance. The tradeoff, at worst is a little extra runtime object code in flow-control (well worth it in non-time-critical loops).

COBOL problem-set programming is always top-down(start with a customer need and work your way down)... your guys were bottom-up (start with hardware and build upwards). I imagine somebody was trying to make a point of some kind(?)

rpl

(had a student whose company sent along some sample maintenance for him to do (and for us to administer) on top of our course materiel. Despite the potential added revenue, both my boss and myself said "No; that one's a rewrite" and sent it back heavily annotated with choice comments... it wasn't a test for the student though; we ended up writing their IS standards.)