Procedural programming

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Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming,^[1] based on the concept of the procedure call. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out. Any given procedure might be called at any point during a program's execution, including by other procedures or itself. The first major procedural programming languages appeared c. 1957–1964, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and BASIC.^[2] Pascal and C were published c. 1970–1972.

Computer processors provide hardware support for procedural programming through a stack register and instructions for calling procedures and returning from them. Hardware support for other types of programming is possible, but no attempt was commercially successful (for example Lisp machines or Java processors).^{[contradictory]}