Understanding structured programming

Structured programming is what we have looked at in this book. Loops, conditionals, and functions define the flow of a program that uses this paradigm. If you have read the previous chapters of this book, then they should all be familiar to you by now.

Structured programming is a branch of a family of paradigms called imperative programming. Languages that use the concepts of imperative programming use statements to change the program's state.

If we look at that definition, we must first learn what statements and program state are.

Statements

In the first part of this definition, we'll talk about statements. A statement, as described in Chapter 5, Sequence – The Basic Building Block of a Computer Program, in the Understanding statements section, this can be viewed as a command that we give to the application. In natural language, we have something that is called the imperative mood. The imperative mood is something...