Procedural programming

Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, classified as imperative programming, that involves implementing the behavior of a computer program as procedures (a.k.a. functions, subroutines) that call each other. The resulting program is a series of steps that forms a hierarchy of calls to its constituent procedures.

This article is about the computer programming paradigm. For the method of algorithmic content creation, see Procedural generation.

The first major procedural programming languages appeared c. 1957–1964, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and BASIC. Pascal and C were published c. 1970–1972.

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, like Lisp machines or Java processors, but no attempt was commercially successful.

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