Since the basic ideas of imperative programming are both conceptually familiar and directly embodied in the hardware, most computer languages are in the imperative style.Īssignment statements, in imperative paradigm, perform an operation on information located in memory and store the results in memory for later use. Recipes and process checklists, while not computer programs, are also familiar concepts that are similar in style to imperative programming each step is an instruction, and the physical world holds the state. Higher-level imperative languages use variables and more complex statements, but still follow the same paradigm. Digital computer hardware is designed to execute machine code, which is native to the computer and is usually written in the imperative style, although low-level compilers and interpreters using other paradigms exist for some architectures such as lisp machines.įrom this low-level perspective, the program state is defined by the contents of memory, and the statements are instructions in the native machine language of the computer. The programming paradigm used to build programs for almost all computers typically follows an imperative model. Rationale and foundations of imperative programming At the same time, a complete program is still imperative since it fixes the statements to be executed and their order of execution to a large extent. A programmer can often tell, simply by looking at the names, arguments, and return types of procedures (and related comments), what a particular procedure is supposed to do, without necessarily looking at the details of how it achieves its result. Procedural programming could be considered a step toward declarative programming. The concepts behind object-oriented programming attempt to extend this approach.
Since the 1960’s, structured programming and modular programming in general have been promoted as techniques to improve the maintainability and overall quality of imperative programs.
Heavy procedural programming, in which state changes are localized to procedures or restricted to explicit arguments and returns from procedures, is a form of structured programming. The terms are often used as synonyms, but the use of procedures has a dramatic effect on how imperative programs appear and how they are constructed. Procedural programming is a type of imperative programming in which the program is built from one or more procedures (also termed subroutines or functions). The term is often used in contrast to declarative programming, which focuses on what the program should accomplish without specifying all the details of how the program should achieve the result. Imperative programming focuses on describing how a program operates step by step, rather than on high-level descriptions of its expected results. In much the same way that the imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands, an imperative program consists of commands for the computer to perform.
#Java meaning in computer language software
In computer science, imperative programming is a programming paradigm of software that uses statements that change a program's state.
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