The procedure level of program structure is partly real and partly conceptual. Procedures are basically just a fancy guise for subroutines.
Procedures within a program are declared with the PROC and ENDP directives in the following form:
name PROC attribute
.
.
.
RET
name ENDP
The attribute carried by a PROC declaration, which is either NEAR or FAR, tells the assembler what type of call you expect to use to enter the procedure——that is, whether the procedure will be called from other routines in the same segment or from routines in other segments. When the assembler encounters a RET instruction within the procedure, it uses the attribute information to generate the correct opcode for either a near (intra-segment) or far (inter-segment) return.
Each program should have a main procedure that receives control from MS-DOS. You specify the entry point for the program by including the name of the main procedure in the END statement in one of the program's source files. The main procedure's attribute (NEAR or FAR) is really not too important, because the program returns control to MS-DOS with a function call rather than a RET instruction. However, by convention, most programmers assign the main procedure the FAR attribute anyway.
You should break the remainder of the program into procedures in an orderly way, with each procedure performing a well-defined single function, returning its results to its caller, and avoiding actions that have global effects within the program. Ideally procedures invoke each other only by CALL instructions, have only one entry point and one exit point, and always exit by means of a RET instruction, never by jumping to some other location within the program.
For ease of understanding and maintenance, a procedure should not exceed one page (about 60 lines); if it is longer than a page, it is probably too complex and you should delegate some of its function to one or more subsidiary procedures. You should preface the source code for each procedure with a detailed comment that states the procedure's calling sequence, results returned, registers affected, and any data items accessed or modified. The effort invested in making your procedures compact, clean, flexible, and well-documented will be repaid many times over when you reuse the procedures in other programs.