[aidanr]

I've just got "Structured Program Design Using JSP" off the bookshelf. Haven't looked at it in about 30 years!

I was once sent on a work course to learn how to write COBOL using Jackson Structured Programming. I _loathed_ it. I remember thinking that

a) it tried reduce the programmers role to little more than that of an automoton b) it was completely at odds with my views (30 years ago and still today) that good software development is a blend of the technical and creative/artistic.

Happily very little of my working life involved actually using JSP (well Java Server Pages excluded).

[Zenst]

Biggest erk and put-off many in COBOL had with JSP was exception handling and with that - without using GOTO (which was banned for JSP hardcore mentalities) you would end up setting flags and having checks - adding a lot of processing into the code-base at a time that was still before the IBM PC was to come about. Even then, CPU's for large mainframes et all, and the cost of CPU cycles and storage, sure did have a far larger value than in later years.

[danielnicholas]

JSP used the "quit" statement to handle errors and backtracking; it was a primitive form of exception before exceptions were common. There's a lengthy defense of this in the JSP book (on p.282) arguing that eliminating GOTOs dogmatically is a mistake.