Procedural programming
Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from structured programming, based upon the concept of the procedure call.
Description
Procedures, also known as routines, subroutines, or functions (not to be confused with mathematical functions, but similar to those used in functional programming), simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out. Any given procedure might be called at any point during a program's execution, including by other procedures or itself.
Procedural programming languages include C, Go, Fortran, Pascal, Ada, and BASIC.
Computer processors provide hardware support for procedural programming through a stack register and instructions for calling procedures and returning from them.
Hardware support for other types of programming is possible, but no attempt was commercially successful (for example Lisp machines or Java processors).
See also
- Comparison of programming paradigms
- Declarative programming
- Functional programming (contrast)
- Imperative programming
- Logic programming
- Object-oriented programming
- Programming paradigms
- Programming language
- Structured programming
- SQL procedural extensions
