Procedural programming languages are programming languages whose code can be divided into procedures.
Programming is a very voluminous field of knowledge, which no person in the world can study in its entirety. There are now more than 120 different programming languages, each of which is used to some extent to solve their specific problems. All languages are divided into different types. A very prominent place was once occupied by the so-called procedural programming languages. Some of them are actively used even now.

The main feature of procedural programming languages is their imperative nature, which means creating a clear set of sequential instructions which must be executed by the computer in turn. The imperative paradigm has the following main characteristics:

The entire program code consists of a set of commands or instructions that are executed by the computer sequentially in a given order;
The data from the first counts can be stored and retrieved from memory at any time and be used.
Even the syntax used in such languages is somewhat imperative – the commands to execute are like orders in ordinary human speech. Other important procedural programming features are the use of subroutines, the active use of the assignment operator, and the presence of compound expressions.

Historically, procedurally-oriented programming languages were the first to appear and all further development of computer technology was largely based on them. That’s why we can safely say that all the first programming languages were procedural. Let’s consider some of them in detail.

Traditionally procedural programming languages include machine instructions as well as assembler languages that appeared later. Machine code was a system of consecutive commands, written for a particular computer, which are executed by the device processor or its microprograms – already written sequences of processor actions. Such instructions are based on the operation of a binary code, which is expressed as a sequence of zeros and ones. To the computer, zero means no electrical signal, and one means that the unit pulse is emitted. Procedural programming is strictly enforced here – each subsequent instruction in a program can be executed only by implementing the previous one. If an error occurred in one of the commands, the program would simply stop and the engineer would have to look for the error in the code.

Assembler languages function in a similar way. The complexity of the commands had been greatly expanded, macros are used, and convenient addressing is possible.