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Thursday, September 25, 2014

What is a programming paradigm?

The fundamental style in which you design and write computer programs is called a programming paradigm. It’s the way you build the elements and structures of your programs. Presently we have the following 6 kinds of programming paradigms:
- Imperative
- Declarative
- Functional
- Object – oriented
- Logic
- Symbolic

Just as the different methodologies define the software engineering, different paradigms define the programming languages. Different languages are designed for supporting different paradigms. For example,
- Object oriented paradigm is adopted by smalltalk
- Functional programming is adopted by Haskell

Though there are certain programming languages that support only one kind of paradigm, there are many others that can work with multiple paradigms. Examples are:
- Object pascal
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Scala
- Visual basic
- Common lisp
- Scheme
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby
- Oz
- F#

The pascal and C++ programs can either be purely object oriented or purely procedural or may contain features of both. It is up to the programmers, how they want to use the paradigms. In object oriented programming, the program is considered as a collection of objects that can interact with each other. Whereas, in functional programming the program is considered as a sequence of the evaluations of stateless functions.
The process – oriented programming helps in designing the programs as a set of processes running concurrently in systems with multiple processors. The shared data structures are used by these processes. Some techniques are allowed by programming paradigms while others are forbidden. For example, the use of side effects is forbidden while using pure functional programming. The use of the dangerous goto statement is not allowed in structured programming. Because of this the modern programming paradigms are considered to be overly strict when compared to their older counterparts.
Proving the theorems can be easy if you avoid the use of certain techniques or if you understand the programs’ behavior. Sometimes programming models are compared with the paradigms. The abstractions of the systems are called systems. An example is the von Neumann model which is used in the sequential computers. There are a number of models for computers using parallel processing.
 Most of the models are based upon message passing, shared memory, hybrid etc. machine code and the assembly language instructions are the programming paradigms of the lowest level. The assembly language makes use of the mnemonics for operations. They are often referred to as the first generation languages. The assembly language is still in use for programming the embedded systems for obtaining direct control over the machine. The next generation of the languages is represented by the procedural languages. Examples are cobol, fortran, algol, PL/I, basic, c etc. procedural paradigm is adopted by all these languages.
The experience and ability of the programmer affects the efficiency and the efficacy of the problem’s solution. Later, the object oriented languages came in to the scenario such as the smalltalk, simula, java, Eiffel, C++ etc. These languages use objects (data and functions or methods for handling it) for modeling the real world problems. The object’s methods are the only way through which the user can access the data. Object oriented paradigm has led to the possibilities of creation of the object – oriented assembler language. For example, the HLA (high level assembly) is such a language that provides support for the advanced data types. In declarative programming paradigms, the problem is told to the computer but not the method. The program thus consists of properties that can be used for finding the result that is expected. The program is not a procedure. 


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