Block Structure
Early in the development of high level languages, the introduction of the block enabled the construction of programs in which a group of statements and declarations could be treated as if they were a single statement. This, alongside the introduction of subroutines, enabled complex structures to be expressed by hierarchical decomposition into simpler procedural structures.
Read more about this topic: Imperative Programming
Famous quotes containing the words block and/or structure:
“Dug from the tomb of taste-refining time,
Each form is exquisite, each block sublime.
Or good, or bad,—disfigur’d, or deprav’d,—
All art, is at its resurrection sav’d;
All crown’d with glory in the critic’s heav’n,
Each merit magnified, each fault forgiven.”
—Martin Archer, Sir Shee (1769–1850)
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)