Procedural Programming

Procedural programming is a programming paradigm in which a program is written as an ordered series of instructions, organised into reusable blocks called procedures, routines or functions. Each procedure performs a task, such as calculating interest or validating an account number, and the program calls them in sequence, passing data between them and changing stored values as it goes. Languages built around this approach include C, Pascal, Fortran and COBOL, the last of which still runs many core banking and payment systems. Procedural code is often easy to follow for straightforward tasks, but large programs can become hard to maintain when many procedures share and change the same data. Other paradigms address this differently: object-oriented languages such as Java and C++ bundle data with the code that acts on it, while functional languages such as Haskell avoid changing shared state. Most modern languages, including JavaScript, allow a procedural style.