Spaghetti code

It is unclear when the phrase spaghetti code was coined. Martin Hopkins made an early reference to spaghetti in this context in 1972, writing that the "principal motivation behind eliminating the goto statement is the hope that the resulting programs will not look like a bowl of spaghetti." In the 1978 book A primer on disciplined programming using PL/I, PL/CS, and PL/CT, Richard Conway described programs that "have the same clean logical structure as a plate of spaghetti", a phrase repeated in the 1979 book An Introduction to Programming he co-authored with David Gries. In the 1988 paper A spiral model of software development and enhancement, the term is used to describe the older practice of the code and fix model, which lacked planning and eventually led to the development of the waterfall model. In the 1979 book Structured programming for the COBOL programmer, author Paul Noll uses the phrases spaghetti code and ''rat's nest'' as synonyms to describe poorly structured source code. In the ''Ada – Europe '93'' conference, Ada was described as forcing the programmer to "produce understandable, instead of spaghetti code", because of its restrictive exception propagation mechanism. In a 1980 publication by the United States National Bureau of Standards, the phrase spaghetti program was used to describe older programs having "fragmented and scattered files". In a 1981 computer languages spoof in The Michigan Technic titled "BASICally speaking...FORTRAN bytes!!", the author described FORTRAN stating that "it consists entirely of spaghetti code". Richard Hamming described in his lectures the etymology of the term in the context of early programming in binary codes: ==Examples==

Simple The following BASIC code, a program that prints 1 to 100, is a relatively simple example of code that can be more easily understood with structured control flow instead of using goto. The use of for looping and lack of indentation leads to less than clear logic flow. 1 i=0 2 i=i+1 3 PRINT i 4 IF i>=100 THEN GOTO 6 5 GOTO 2 6 END The following code produces the same result, but uses a structured loop statement and indentation to improve readability. 1 FOR i=1 TO 100 2 PRINT i 3 NEXT i 4 END More representative The following code implements a numeric sorting algorithm. The use of goto statements results in a spaghetti-like nature to the control flow. INPUT "How many numbers should be sorted? "; T DIM n(T) FOR i = 1 TO T PRINT "NUMBER:"; i INPUT n(i) NEXT i 'Calculations: C = T E180: C = INT(C / 2) IF C = 0 THEN GOTO C330 D = T - C E = 1 I220: f = E F230: g = f + C IF n(f) > n(g) THEN SWAP n(f), n(g) f = f - C IF f > 0 THEN GOTO F230 E = E + 1 IF E > D THEN GOTO E180 GOTO I220 C330: PRINT "The sorted list is" FOR i = 1 TO T PRINT n(i) NEXT i ==Related==

Big ball of mud A big ball of mud is a software system that lacks a perceivable architecture. Although undesirable from a software engineering point of view, such systems are common in practice due to business pressures, developer turnover and software entropy. The term was popularized by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder although they credit Brian Marick for coining the term. Pasta-related Inspired by the popularity of spaghetti code, other pasta-oriented terms that describe the structural nature of code include: ; Lasagna code: Lasagna code has layers that are so intertwined that making a change in one layer necessitates changing other layers too. ; Ravioli code: Ravioli code comprises well-structured classes that are easy to understand in isolation but in combination result in less than clear system design. == See also ==