View source for 3.1.1 Procedural Programming

=== 3.1.1 Procedural Programming ===
Imagine you have a recipe for baking cookies. It's a list of steps, one after another: "Mix flour and sugar," "Add eggs," "Stir well," "Bake for 10 minutes." You follow the instructions in order, and voilà, you get cookies!

'''Procedural Programming''' is a lot like that. It's one of the oldest and most straightforward ways to tell a computer what to do. In procedural programming, you '''write a series of steps (or procedures) that the computer follows in order.'''

'''Key Idea:''' The main idea is to break your program into smaller parts called '''procedures''' (also known as '''functions''' or '''subroutines'''). Each procedure does a specific job. For example, one procedure might calculate a number, another might print something on the screen, and another might save information.

'''How it Works:'''

* '''Instructions:''' You give the computer a list of commands.
* '''Order Matters:''' The computer runs these commands one by one, from top to bottom.
* '''Procedures/Functions:''' You can group related commands into a function and then "call" that function whenever you need that job done. This saves you from writing the same code over and over.

'''Example:''' Let's say you want to calculate the area of a rectangle. A procedural program might look like this (in plain English, not actual code):

# '''START'''
# Get the length of the rectangle.
# Get the width of the rectangle.
# Multiply the length by the width to find the area.
# Show the calculated area.
# '''END'''

This is a step-by-step procedure. Many older programming languages like '''Fortran''' and '''C''' are procedural, and even modern languages can be used in a procedural way.

'''Bibliography:'''

* '''GeeksforGeeks''': https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dbms/what-is-procedural-language/
* '''Wikipedia - Procedural Programming''': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_programming