Talk:Procedural programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:33, 8 January 2022

Revision as of 08:48, 2 September 2022

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I was under the impression that the term "procedural languages" was originally synonymous with what we mean by imperative programming today. At least, back in the early 1990s when I started learning how to write in BASIC, I heard of the classification "procedural language" and the programming style it describes, but did not hear about "imperative" programming until a few years later. What's the actual story -- when were the terms introduced and when did their meanings diverge so that "procedural" implies something more specific than "imperative"? According to Google Ngram, "procedural programming" gradually appeared in the early 1960s, rose sharply from 1980-1990 and then declined, while "imperative programming" was flat until around 1979, then rose sharply with a similar shape (but smaller). It would be great if anyone has some references pointing to early definitions of the terms. [[User:Destynova|Destynova]] ([[User talk:Destynova|talk]]) 06:42, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

== This article should be removed. Procedural abstraction is prevalent in every programming paradigm ==

There is no procedural paradigm as such. Any algorithm is a sequence of steps transforming an input (possibly null) to some answer, it does not matter if such language is imperative or declarative. Imperative languages compute by mutating the state of memory, a program is a composition of such instructions with the help of control statements, functional programming does the same by composing functions.

OO programming created a lot of confusion, because instead of writing code composed with instructions, in OO it is supposed that objects are sending messages to other objects, those messages order to perform some procedure called object's method. The main difference is an exacerbated use of encapsulation which induce an anthropomorphic approach to the problem.

'''Is procedural programming implementing algorithms in a procedural language?'''

That's probably the source of confusion.

'''What can be said if procedures are implemented with coroutines?'''