Procedural Programming Language

Procedural language is a computer programming language that specifies a series of well-structured steps and procedures within its programming context to compose a program. It contains a systematic order of statements, functions and commands to complete a computational task or program. 

Procedural language is also known as imperative language.

Procedural language, as the name implies, relies on predefined and well-organized procedures, functions or sub-routines in a program’s architecture by specifying all the steps that the computer must take to reach a desired state or output. 

Procedural language segregates a program within variables, functions, statements and conditional operators. Procedures or functions are implemented on the data and variables to perform a task. These procedures can be called/invoked anywhere between the program hierarchy, and by other procedures as well. A program written in procedural language contains one or more procedures. 

Procedural language is one of the most common programming languages in use with notable languages such as C/C++, Java, ColdFusion and PASCAL.

Benefits of Procedural Languages

• Extensibility. Utilizing the internal PLs enables developers to quickly create custom functions, triggers, and rules to add functionality not already present in the base system. Moreover, once these extensions are enabled, they become available to other SQL statements present in the system.
• Control structures. By default, the SQL language does not allow the programmer to use the rich set of control structures and conditional evaluations included in other common programming languages. For this reason, the included PLs allow a developer to marry such traditional control structures with the SQL language. This is particularly useful when creating complex computations and triggers.
• Productivity and compatibility. By using the included PostgreSQL PLs, the developer can have access to all the included data types, operators, and functions already present in the base system. This can significantly increase productivity because the programmer does not need to re-create common elements already defined in PostgreSQL in his or her own custom code. Additionally, the developer can have a high level of assurance that the returned data types and comparison results will be compatible with the PostgreSQL back end.
• Security. The included PostgreSQL PLs are trusted by the back-end system and only have access to a limited set of system-wide functions. In particular, the included PLs operate, on a system level, with the same permissions granted to the base postgres user. This is because it implies that extraneous file system objects will be safe from any errant code.

One of the advantages of procedural programming is that is has a quicker completion than OOP or Object-Oriented programing. A disadvantage to this technique is a lack of flexibility.