Assembly and Script Languages
When using the many forms of assembly language (and also the underlying machine code) the danger of writing spaghetti code is especially great. This is because they are low-level programming languages where equivalents for structured control flow statements such as for loops and while loops exist, but are often poorly understood by inexperienced programmers. Many scripting languages have the same deficiencies: this applies to the batch scripting language of DOS and DCL on VMS.
Nonetheless, adopting the same discipline as in structured programming can greatly improve the readability and maintainability of such code. This may take the form of conventions limiting the use of goto to correspond to the standard structures, or use of a set of assembler macros for if and loop constructs. Most assembly languages also provide a function stack, and function call mechanisms which can be used to gain the advantages of procedural programming. Macros can again be used to support a standardized form of parameter passing, to avoid ad hoc global variables and the action at a distance anti-pattern.
Programs written in higher-level languages with high-level constructs such as for loops (as in the second example above) are often compiled into assembly or machine code. When this process occurs, the high-level constructs are translated into low-level "spaghetti code" which may resemble the first example above in terms of control flow. But because compilers must be faithful to high-level constructs in the source code, the problems that plague relatively unstructured languages like BASIC do not haunt higher-level languages. It does, however, mean that debugging even mildly optimized code with a source-level debugger can be surprisingly confusing.
Read more about this topic: Spaghetti Code
Famous quotes containing the words assembly, script and/or languages:
“There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Take what the old-church
found in Mithra’s tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)