Procedural programming

Procedural programming describes a way of decomposing a programming problem, when a larger problem is decomposed into smaller ones by means of subprograms. This type of decomposition is called procedural. It is typical for imperative programming and functional programming paradigms.

In object-oriented programming procedural decomposition plays a subordinate role. Subprograms become methods of objects, which replace the former as building blocks.

Historically procedural programming played a decisive role in the transformation of engineering problems into programming solutions. Until recently the great majority of reusable software components has been designed, deployed, and maintained in the form libraries of subprograms.