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The Computer Journal 1986 29(1):24-32; doi:10.1093/comjnl/29.1.24
© 1986 by British Computer Society
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The Hierarchy of Program Control Structures

J. Fucík * and J. Král *

Institute for Computation Technique of Technique University, Horska 3, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechoslovakia

The structural hierarchy of programs is presented in this paper. It is defined on the basis of a composition of control structures. It is shown that there is an infinite hierarchy {phi}1,{phi}2,... {phi}n,... so that the control structures in {phi}n cannot be expressed as a superposition of control structures in {cup}k–1n–1{phi}k unless we use new variables or GOTO statements. {phi}1 contains D-structures (Ref.7), {phi}2 contains cycles with two exits, {phi}3 is partly covered by Adams' (Ref.1) proposal. Three characterisations of {phi}n are introduced and their hierarchy is inspected. From the hierarchy new control structures convenient for implementation are deduced. Our results show some limits of GOTO-less programming and indicate some reasons why GOTO statement has returned into programming languages.

Received January 1984.

* Institute for Computation Technique of Technique University, Horská 3, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechoslovakia


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