DAT 390 Wk 5 – Practice: Reading

Accurately complete the 5.1 to 5.7 Reading, Participation, and Challenge Activities to receive full points for this practice. You have unlimited attempts. The points you see in zyBooks do not reflect the points you receive in the gradebook.

Programming languages

Programming languages fall into two broad categories, or paradigms: imperative and declarative.

Imperative languages contain control flow statements that determine the execution order of program steps. Control flow statements include loops for repeatedly executing code and conditionals for conditionally executing code. Two popular types of imperative languages are:

1. Procedural languages are composed of procedures, also called functions or subroutines. Most languages developed prior to 1990 are procedural. Ex: C and COBOL.
2. Object-oriented languages organize code into classes. A class combines variables and procedures into a single construct. Most languages developed since 1990 are object-oriented. Ex: Java, Python, and C++.

Declarative languages do not contain control flow statements. Each statement declares what result is desired, using logical expressions, rather than how the result is processed. Compilers for declarative languages are called optimizers, since the compiler determines an optimal way to process each declarative statement. SQL is the leading example of a declarative language.