What is the difference between procedural programming and functional programming? [closed]

Answer 1

Procedural languages tend to keep track of state (using variables) and tend to execute as a sequence of steps. Purely functional languages don't keep track of state, use immutable values, and tend to execute as a series of dependencies. In many cases the status of the call stack will hold the information that would be equivalent to that which would be stored in state variables in procedural code.

Recursion is a classic example of functional style programming.

Answer 2

A functional programming is identical to procedural programming in which global variables are not being used.

Answer 3

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the procedural programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

Answer 4

I've never seen this definition given elsewhere, but I think this sums up the differences given here fairly well:

Functional programming focuses on expressions

Procedural programming focuses on statements

Expressions have values. A functional program is an expression who's value is a sequence of instructions for the computer to carry out.

Statements don't have values and instead modify the state of some conceptual machine.

In a purely functional language there would be no statements, in the sense that there's no way to manipulate state (they might still have a syntactic construct named "statement", but unless it manipulates state I wouldn't call it a statement in this sense). In a purely procedural language there would be no expressions, everything would be an instruction which manipulates the state of the machine.

Haskell would be an example of a purely functional language because there is no way to manipulate state. Machine code would be an example of a purely procedural language because everything in a program is a statement which manipulates the state of the registers and memory of the machine.

The confusing part is that the vast majority of programming languages contain both expressions and statements, allowing you to mix paradigms. Languages can be classified as more functional or more procedural based on how much they encourage the use of statements vs expressions.

For example, C would be more functional than COBOL because a function call is an expression, whereas calling a sub program in COBOL is a statement (that manipulates the state of shared variables and doesn't return a value). Python would be more functional than C because it allows you to express conditional logic as an expression using short circuit evaluation (test && path1 || path2 as opposed to if statements). Scheme would be more functional than Python because everything in scheme is an expression.

You can still write in a functional style in a language which encourages the procedural paradigm and vice versa. It's just harder and/or more awkward to write in a paradigm which isn't encouraged by the language.

Answer 5

One thing I hadn't seen really emphasized here is that modern functional languages such as Haskell really more on first class functions for flow control than explicit recursion. You don't need to define factorial recursively in Haskell, as was done above. I think something like

fac n = foldr (*) 1 [1..n]

is a perfectly idiomatic construction, and much closer in spirit to using a loop than to using explicit recursion.