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2 Imperative and Procedural Programming

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2 Imperative and Procedural Programming

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jeff.kaharu
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BCT 2104

PRINCIPLES OF
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Lecture 1b:Introduction and Motivation

More is not better (or worse) than less, just different.


{The paradigm paradox}
Imperative/ Procedural programming

 Most widely used & oldest paradigm


 Largest number of languages

 E.g. C, FORTRAN, Java/C++ (without the objects)


 Features closely related to machine architecture

 Based on the von Neumann stored program model

 An imperative programmer declares a set of variables and data


structures that represent his/her view of the memory of the
computer.
 Weak abstraction: the ability to uses names instead of addresses.
 But the programming still largely requires thinking about how memory
needs to be modified.
 Procedures/subroutines and objects extend this abstraction, but
they still have the same focus on modifying memory via variables.
Imperative programming contd…
 An imperative program essentially consists of a sequence
of assignments to variables.
 The sequence may contain loops, jumps, branches, etc
 These are abstracted as for-loops, while-loops, case-
statements, etc.
 More precisely, the program describes a set of possible
sequences.
 Program execution consists of performing these
assignments in the sequence described by the program.
 The exact sequence actually performed generally depends
on the input (and so does the output).
Turing Completeness
 A programming language is said to be Turing Complete if it
contains
 Integer variables, values and operations
 Assignments, branching, sequencing, and conditionals
 Other features make languages easier to program for complex
applications
 Loops
 Procedures
 Object Orientation
 But they have the same power as any other programming
language
 i.e. what is possible to compute in one is possible in the
other
Other Features
 Typical Turing complete language today supports:
 Data types for reals, chars, strings, booleans
 For, while, switch
 Arrays
 Records
 I/O commands
 Pointers
 Procedures and functions
Imperative Programming Design Principles

 Structured Programming
 The structure of the program text should be the guide to
understanding what it does.
 Can be more efficient
 Improved readability
 Easier to tune and modify
 Efficiency
 A language must allow an underlying assignment-oriented machine
to be used directly and efficiently.
 Driving factor in the implementation of many imperative languages
Types in Typical Imperative
Languages
 Emphasis on data structures with assignable
components
 Based on values that can be manipulated directly by
underlying machine
 Size and layout fixed at compile time
 Storage allocated and deallocated explicitly
 Strongly typed
 Storage efficiency is key
Issues with imperative programming

 Imprecise semantics
 Different implementations often behave differently
 Portability problem
 Constrained order of execution
 side-effects
 different execution orders give different results
 difficult to introduce parallelism
 Weak abstraction mechanisms
 the programmer often has to consider the computer and its store
 Difficulty of storage management
 The updating of variables and the manual reuse of store leads to errors due
to overwritten values, dangling pointers, aliasing, etc.
 Java, C#, etc. partly avoid this by garbage collection (as in FP).
What is functional programming?
 At a high level: functional programming focuses on
building functions.
 The programmer declares what the program does by
defining a function that maps inputs to outputs.
 Complex functions are built by composing simpler
functions.
 letsquare x = x*x letsumSqr(x,y) = square x + square y
 Generally this means functions in the mathematical
sense:
 In particular, variables are not modified by the code.
 Instead variables are just names for values.
Functional Programming: Point of Departure

 Functional programming departs from the imperative model by retaining


the mathematical form of variables. This means that modifying variables
is not allowed.

 Instead, to evaluate a formula many times, it is placed in a function, and


the function is called many times. This is exactly what is done in
mathematics.

 Instead of loops and gotos, recursive functions are emphasized, as well as


applying functions to each element in a list or collection.

 There is also an emphasis on writing simple but general functions. E.g.,


to sum the squares of the numbers from 1 to 10:
 let k = sum [for xin 1..10 -> x*x]
Abstraction in Functional Languages

 Functional languages are deliberately less directly based on the way


the CPU and memory work.

 The programmer declares a set of data types that define the data on
which the program will operate
 strong abstraction: values and store are distinct
 how values are represented is left up to the implementation
 The program consists of function definitions over values of these data
types: functions may be built from any well-defined operations on the
data.

 Program execution consists of applying one of the defined functions to


some input values.
Advantages
 Precise formal semantics
 Flexible order of execution
 functions operate “in isolation”
 natural parallel interpretation
 particularly true for “pure” functional languages
 Rich abstraction mechanisms
 values are distinct from the store
 abstract over functions, infinite data structures, etc
 Automatic storage management
 let the system do the work!
Disadvantages
 The programmer has less control over exactly what happens with the
CPU and memory.
 More efficient programs are often possible in a lower level language like C
(with some work).
 Sometimes a bad order of execution may lead to excessive memory use.
 strict functional languages like F# largely avoid this. HOW???
 Sometimes the natural way of expressing an algorithm is via a sequence
of assignments.
 Modern functional languages generally support imperative programming also
in some way.
 Pure FLs like Haskell use monads. (A structure that represents
computations defined as a sequence of steps. This allows the
programmer to apply pipelining)
What is FP used for?
 Lisp and Scheme are used widely in the field of artificial intelligence, as
extension languages (e.g. for AutoCAD) and for general programming
 ML(including F#) is used for building robust software, language related
tools, formal verification tools, scientific programming, financial
programming and general programming
 Haskell is used widely for fast prototyping of programs, to build tools for
hardware design and verification, to prototype implementations of new
languages and for general programming
 Erlang is used at Ericsson and related companies for many applications in
the field of telecommunications
 Many special purpose languages such as SQL(for database queries) and
XSLT(for XML transformations) are functional languages
 Functional languages have survived the test of time, and continue to
spread and influence other languages
References
 Balci, O. (1998), Software Engineering Lecture
Notes, Department of Computer Science, Virginia
Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
 Schach, R. (1999), Software Engineering, Fourth
Edition, McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA.

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