It is often contrasted with the structured programming paradigm, in particular with the use of unstructured control flow using goto statements or equivalent.
The distinction was particularly stressed by the publication of the influential "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming".
[1] Unstructured programming has been heavily criticized for producing hardly readable ("spaghetti") code.
A program in a non-structured language uses unstructured jumps to labels or instruction addresses.
This is in contrast to structured programming which uses sequential constructs of statements, selection (if/then/else) and repetition (while and for).