I’m not obsessive about it, but it makes the logic easier to follow when you look at your code a few years, months, days, or (fatigued) minutes later.

Although is not always possible (or even pragmatic) is to make functions as generic as possible. This allows them to be tested independently and encourages reuse adding to my code library.

Often (but not always), simply by defining a simple, single task that a function needs to achieve is enough to help from letting the size get out of control.

Cheers - Marcus

(Pascal syntax)
program …
Initialize();
Input();
Process();
Output();
CleanUp();
end.

(C syntax)
main(…) {
init();
while ( ! feof(STDIN) ) {
proc();
}
wrapup();
}

That’s foolish. It’s one thing to encapsulate specific functionality in a function or procedure, quite another to make the main program skeleton reusable.

I can see the JOS guy’s point: functions and procedures are only needed when specific bits of code would be run multiple times within the same program or from multiple programs. It’s pointless to compartmentalize anything that’s truly once-off.