1.2.4 Types of Programming Languages

What is meant by a programming paradigm?

• A style of programming (not a type of programming language.)

Name three different programming paradigms

Procedural / Imperative / structured, Declarative, Functional, Object oriented

Why is there a need for different programming paradigms?

• There are many different types of problem, which can be most easily solved by using one method rather than another. 

• (example) e.g. querying a database is much easier for the programmer in SQL than in a procedural or object oriented language.  

• Large systems may be easier to maintain if they are written using a particular paradigm (e.g. OOP)

• Different languages have been developed to enable different ways of programming solutions to problems.

describe procedural programming and give an example

• an imperative programming which uses a sequence of instructions which may be contained within procedures. These instructions are carried out in a step-by-step manner.

• Examples: Pascal, Python,

describe ooping and examples

• OOP is built on entities called objects formed from classes which have certain attributes and methods.

• Examples: Python, Delphi, Java

describe imperative programming

• a series of instructions that tell the computer what to do with the input in order

to solve the problem

describe structured programming

• a kind of procedural (imperative) programming which uses the constructs sequence, selection, iteration and recursion rather than “goto” statements

• Modular techniques are used to split a large program

  into manageable chunks

describe declarative programming

• the language implementation then finds the best way of solving it

• used to create, amend and query databased

describe logic programming

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