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What exactly is behind the notion of "sequential programming language" ?

I couldn't find a proper / deep description for that. I clearly see what a sequential algorithm is, but a programming language.

Sequential could be opposed to procedural, but...

What would be a language said "strictly sequential" ? Is it only a matter of giving or not the possibility to deal with functions ?

I know that this question is a bit too general and would require more than a simple Q&A, but an introduction and/or some good pointers on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT : Well, after further reading (thanks to msw and Edorka), I realize that the above quoted assumption is the result of my misunderstanding of some basic vocabulary and relies on nothing concrete. And consequently this question becomes pointless. But thanks for your time and precious developments guys!

EDIT :sequential would be better opposed to...

Gauthier Boaglio
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I would say — lacking further context — that sequential could be synonymous with imperative or contrasted with "event-driven", "concurrent", "parallel", "declarative", or "quantum".

I don't know where you got your quoted text, but if you unroll a procedural program it is "sequential" and so from a theoretical perspective, it's a useless distinction.

msw
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  • Ok, both remarks make perfectly sense to me. What do you call "quantum" ? What is it used for, if you can find simple words for this ? – Gauthier Boaglio Jun 19 '13 at 14:46
  • So, as far as I understand, for short, C, for example, can be considered as sequential, as long as I don't use any kind of parallelism. – Gauthier Boaglio Jun 19 '13 at 14:57
  • I know nothing about [quantum computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer), and only added that as something that is (probably) different from "sequential". – msw Jun 19 '13 at 18:02
  • See also the "Getting Started with Erlang User's Guide". The first section is called "Sequential Programming", and the second is "Concurrent Programming". http://erlang.org/doc/getting_started/seq_prog.html – labyrinth Feb 10 '16 at 16:35
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Maybe you can consider Locomotive Basic 1.0 as sequential because every line had a number before, there were not functions as we now use then, you do GOSUB <line number> or GOTO <line number>. As example:

5 CLS;
10 PRINT "WHAT YEAR IS NOW?"
20 READ YEAR%
30 IF (YEAR% < 1981) THEN GOTO 50
40 PRINT "THIS IS THE FUTURE, DUDE"
50 END;

Of course these programs had an start and end points and were run on a single CPU. I suppose that the difference with procedural languages is that this last ones are not limited to a single run thread.

Edorka
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  • Ok, good point. Of course sequential can only be envisaged in single-threaded context. Thanks for the good old piece of code. Now that your showing this it reminds me things. That kind of language still exists and are used in some domains those days ? – Gauthier Boaglio Jun 19 '13 at 14:20
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    I just read this from slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/19/1227244/pdp-11-still-working-in-nuclear-plants---for-37-more-years Furthermore today there are still a lot of scientific programs written in FORTRAN and banks are the ones maintaining COBOL applications and no sight of replacing them. – Edorka Jun 19 '13 at 14:26
  • That's an amazing link. Thanks. – Gauthier Boaglio Jun 19 '13 at 14:30
  • Yes I knew about the banks... mostly because they cannot take the risk to change their secure systems by reimplementing something. But do COBOL and FORTRAN can be said sequential ? – Gauthier Boaglio Jun 19 '13 at 14:38