The reinforcement that supports a construction can be called a structure.
Structure is the distribution of the parts of a body, although it can also be used in an abstract sense. The concept, which comes from the Latin structura , refers to the arrangement and order of the parts within a whole .
From this definition, the notion of structure has countless applications. It can be the distribution and order of the main parts of a building or a house , as well as the framework or base that supports the construction . For example: “At first glance it seems like a very modern building, but we would have to analyze its structure,” “I love the structure of this house, with the bathroom located next to the main room,” “A failure in the structure caused the collapse.” of a tower in Kuala Lumpur.”
The structure is also the distribution and order of the components or parts of a work of genius : “Stephen King's new book has a structure composed of eight chapters and a preface,” “The structure of the most popular songs is made up of by verse-chorus-verse” , “It is a film with an unusual structure, which begins with the death of the protagonist and then narrates how he arrived at said fatal moment” .
Structure in sociology and computer science
For sociology , the social structure is the population that has a certain organization and a certain technology, which coexists and develops in an environment.
In the field of computing , the data structure is the form of organization of elementary data with the intention of facilitating programming work. Elementary data, on the other hand, is the minimum information available about a system .
Structured programming
Structured programming is known as a paradigm that seeks to facilitate the understanding of the code, reduce development time and improve the quality of computer programs, simply using subroutines and blocks of code (also called sequences , they are sections with a variable number of statements and statements; in other words, the most abundant content of a program), conditional statements ( switch and if selections) and for and while loops .
The idea of structure appears in the field of programming.
On the other hand, structured programming rejects the use of the GOTO instruction (from the English go to , which means to go to ), which allows jumping from one point to another in the code and makes it difficult to track and maintain, in addition to having been the origin of a large number of errors in its heyday .
This way of conceiving the development of programs emerged at the end of the 70s, and its promoters assured that any application could be built based on its principles; Although there are languages with more structures than those contemplated by this paradigm, all of them can be reproduced from if , switch , for and while .
Benefits of programming with structures
Among the advantages it offers with respect to the programming method used until its appearance, in addition to those mentioned above, are the following:
* allows modifications to the finalized code to be made more easily, which has a positive impact on maintenance costs;
* the various instructions show a greater relationship with each other, which makes the code structure clearer and more consistent;
* the code is easier to understand, since the reading is done in sequence, without the confusing line breaks typical of using GOTO ;
* testing and debugging the programs requires less effort, given the greater clarity of the structure;
* Relying on this paradigm makes the process simpler from the first phase: design.
Although it is possible to respect the principles of structured programming using any language , the most used during the first years were Pascal, ALGOL, Ada and PL/I. In recent decades, other paradigms have emerged, such as object-oriented and modular programming, each trying to solve different problems.