Procedural language

Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from structured programming, based upon the concept of the procedure call. 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. The first major procedural programming languages first appeared circa 1960, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL and BASIC.Pascal and C were published closer to the 1970s, while Ada was released in 1980.Go is an example of a more modern procedural language, first published in 2009.

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).

Modularity is generally desirable, especially in large, complicated programs. Inputs are usually specified syntactically in the form of arguments and the outputs delivered as return values.

Scoping is another technique that helps keep procedures modular. It prevents the procedure from accessing the variables of other procedures (and vice versa), including previous instances of itself, without explicit authorization.

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