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Spaghetti code is a pejorative phrase for difficult-to-maintain and unstructured computer source code. Code being developed with poor structure can be due to any of several factors, such as volatile project requirements, lack of programming style rules, and software engineers with insufficient ability or experience.
In a 1980 publication by the United States National Bureau of Standards, the phrase spaghetti program was used to describe older programs having "fragmented and scattered files".
Spaghetti code can also describe an anti-pattern in which object-oriented code is written in a procedural style, such as by creating classes whose methods are overly long and messy, or forsaking object-oriented concepts like polymorphism. The presence of this form of spaghetti code can significantly reduce the comprehensibility of a system. (2025). 9781612842592 ISBN 9781612842592
/ref> In the 1978 book A primer on disciplined programming using PL/I, PL/CS, and PL/CT, Richard Conway described programs that "have the same clean logical structure as a plate of spaghetti", a phrase repeated in the 1979 book An Introduction to Programming he co-authored with David Gries.In the Ada – Europe '93 conference, Ada was described as forcing the programmer to "produce understandable, instead of spaghetti code", because of its restrictive exception propagation mechanism.
In a 1981 computer languages spoof in The Michigan Technic titled "BASICally speaking...FORTRAN bytes!!", the author described FORTRAN stating that "it consists entirely of spaghetti code".
Richard Hamming described in his lectures (1996). 9789056995003, Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9789056995003 the etymology of the term in the context of early programming in binary codes:
Here is the same code written in a structured programming style:
The program jumps from one area to another, but this jumping is formal and more easily predictable, because and Subroutine provide control flow whereas the goto statement encourages arbitrary flow control. Though this example is small, real world programs are composed of many lines of code and are difficult to maintain when written in a spaghetti code fashion.
Here is another example of spaghetti code with embedded GOTO statements.
INPUT "How many numbers should be sorted? "; T
DIM n(T)
FOR i = 1 TO T
PRINT "NUMBER:"; i
INPUT n(i)
NEXT i
'Calculations:
C = T
E180:
C = INT(C / 2)
IF C = 0 THEN GOTO C330
D = T - C
E = 1
I220:
f = E
F230:
g = f + C
IF n(f) > n(g) THEN SWAP n(f), n(g)
f = f - C
IF f > 0 THEN GOTO F230
E = E + 1
IF E > D THEN GOTO E180
GOTO I220
C330:
PRINT "The sorted list is"
FOR i = 1 TO T
PRINT n(i)
NEXT i
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