Procedural Language

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What Does Procedural Language Mean?

A procedural language is a type of computer programming language that specifies a series of well-structured steps and procedures within its programming context to compose a program. It contains a systematic order of statements, functions and commands to complete a computational task or program.

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Procedural language is also known as imperative language.

Techopedia Explains Procedural Language

A procedural language, as the name implies, relies on predefined and well-organized procedures, functions or sub-routines in a program’s architecture by specifying all the steps that the computer must take to reach a desired state or output.

The procedural language segregates a program within variables, functions, statements and conditional operators. Procedures or functions are implemented on the data and variables to perform a task. These procedures can be called/invoked anywhere between the program hierarchy, and by other procedures as well. A program written in procedural language contains one or more procedures.

Procedural language is one of the most common types of programming languages in use, with notable languages such as C/C++, Java, ColdFusion and PASCAL.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.