Overview of the imperative paradigm

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Programming Paradigms - slide 5 : 8

Overview of the imperative paradigm

First do this and next do that

Characteristics:
- Discipline and idea
  - Digital hardware technology and the ideas of Von Neumann
- Incremental change of the program state as a function of time.
- Execution of computational steps in an order governed by control structures
  - We call the steps for commands
- Straightforward abstractions of the way a traditional Von Neumann computer works
- Similar to descriptions of everyday routines, such as food recipes and car repair
- Typical commands offered by imperative languages
  - Assignment, IO, procedure calls
- Language representatives
  - Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Basic, C
- The natural abstraction is the procedure
  - Abstracts one or more actions to a procedure, which can be called as a single command.
  - "Procedural programming"

Foldoc: imperative