Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote: > "imperative" and "procedural" are the same thing,
Well, not _exactly_. Procedural is a subset of imperative. One could trivially imagine an imperative language with no subroutines, which could hardly be called "procedural". In fact, MS-DOS's shell is such a language (especially early versions, prior to the addition of the "call" command). But for the most part, practically speaking, yes, most imperative languages are procedural. > and C is a prime > example. It is such because the structure of a C program is a > collection of procedures which start with "main". Each procedure is a > linear list of statements to be executed in order. Yes. Though C is also a very low-level language, which is why it is sometimes called a "portable macro-assembler". > | it has no loops, assignments, variables or whatever. > | > | Since Lisp is very similar, I was wondering if it's also "functional"... > > Lisp is "functional". The functional paradigm is based entirely on > functions. A function receives some input values (arguments) and > returns some value. It is based heavily on discrete mathmatics and > recursion. But Lisp is not _only_ functional, or even primarily. It has a number of imperative features such as (progn) and (setq), and makes no attempt to isolate side effects. Essentially, the definition of a functional language is that it is based on lambda calculus or combinators, and > The other two categories of programming languages are OO > (object-oriented) and Logic. Python, C++ and Java are OO languages. > Prolog is a logic based language. There are a number of categories beyond this, but no need to go into all of them here. Many types are subclasses of other types, as well. Java is a fairly lame example of an OO language; Smalltalk is a much better one. Calling Python and C++ OO languages is misleading, since both of them support a variety of programming models to varying extents. For example, Python has some functional-language-like capabilities such as lambdas, while C++ templates are really a nod in the direction of type genericity, and have nothing directly to do with OO. If you wanted to list some languages that are more or less pure examples of particular types, I would suggest the following: Imperative non-procedural: early Fortrans, COBOLs, and BASICs; Bourne sh Procedural: Algol-60, Pascal, C Functional: Haskell OO: Smalltalk Logic: Prolog Craig
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