Editing Modular programming (section)

{{Short description|Software design technique}}
{{More citations needed|date=June 2022}}
'''Modular programming''' is a [[software design]] technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a [[Computer program|program]] into independent, interchangeable '''modules''', such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect or [[separation of concerns|"concern"]] of the desired functionality.

A module [[interface (computing)|interface]] expresses the elements that are provided and required by the module. The elements defined in the interface are detectable by other modules. The [[implementation]] contains the working code that corresponds to the elements declared in the interface. Modular programming is closely related to [[structured programming]] and [[object-oriented programming]], all having the same goal of facilitating construction of large software programs and systems by [[Decomposition_(computer_science)|decomposition]] into smaller pieces, and all originating around the 1960s. While the historical usage of these terms has been inconsistent, "modular programming" now refers to the high-level decomposition of the code of an entire program into pieces: structured programming to the low-level code use of structured [[control flow]], and object-oriented programming to the ''data'' use of [[Object (computer science)|objects]], a kind of [[data structure]].

In object-oriented programming, the use of interfaces as an architectural pattern to construct modules is known as [[interface-based programming]].{{citation needed|date=June 2015}}