Editing Procedural programming (section)

{{Short description|Computer programming paradigm}}
{{About|the computer programming paradigm|the method of algorithmic content creation|Procedural generation}}
{{More citations needed|date=April 2008}}

'''Procedural programming''' is a [[programming paradigm]], classified as [[imperative programming]],<ref>{{cite web |url=https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/paradigms/ |title=Programming Paradigms
}}</ref> that involves implementing the behavior of a [[computer program]] as [[Function (computer programming)|procedures (a.k.a. functions, subroutines)]] that call each other. The resulting program is a series of steps that forms a hierarchy of calls to its constituent procedures.

The first major procedural programming languages appeared {{circa|1957}}–1964, including [[Fortran]], [[ALGOL]], [[COBOL]], [[PL/I]] and [[BASIC]].<ref name=":0">{{cite conference
|book-title=Proceedings. The Seventh IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Application
|title=Welcome to IEEE Xplore 2.0: Use of procedural programming languages for controlling production systems
|publisher=[[IEEE]]
|doi=10.1109/CAIA.1991.120848
|s2cid=58175293
}}</ref> [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]] and [[C (programming language)|C]] were published {{circa|1970}}–1972.

[[Computer processor]]s provide hardware support for procedural programming through a [[stack register]] and instructions for [[Subroutine#Jump to subroutine|calling procedures]] and returning from them. Hardware support for other types of programming is possible, like [[Lisp machines]] or [[Java processor]]s, but no attempt was commercially successful.{{Contradictory inline|article=Java processor|reason=It says they are today the most popular form of a high-level language computer architecture.|date=October 2017|section=}}