🚀 go-pugleaf

Some people have recently asked which languages are procedural.  The
discussion went on to talk about languages that have procedures.

I've always thought that procedural languages were those in which you
have to specify the procedure that the computer must follow to evaluate
your program.  Non-procedural languages are those that can be viewed as
a static set of definitions.  E.g. pure Prolog programs can be viewed 
as a logic specification, pure functional programs can be viewed as
specifying the result of a set of equations, and Lucid can be viewed
as specifying the result of operations on potentially infinite sequences.

Programs in all these examples can also be interpreted procedurally.
Often, if not always, you have to view them procedurally as well as 
statically when creating them.  But the static view makes them much more
amenable to analysis.


Dave Berry,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
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