Re: coding of algorithms is inherently procedural

I think that algorithm descriptions are often procedural because a procedural approach represents the lowest common denominator of understanding among students. Everyone has followed step-by-step procedures in their life and good pedagogy strives to provide an impedance match between new material and the students' previous experience.

Not all books approachs algorithms in a procedural manner, however. Higher Order Perl, for instance treats a number of algorithms from a functional point of view, as do most books on Haskell. Books on SQL algorithms (like my favorite, SQL for Smarties) are mostly declarative in style.

-Mark

Comment on Re: coding of algorithms is inherently procedural

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Re^2: coding of algorithms is inherently procedural by spurperl (Priest) on May 19, 2005 at 05:12 UTC
Giving it some more thought and after some online research, I think I have a clearer view on this: We should separate two things: algorithms and programming techniques. Algorithms like "to solve ax = c for x, divide c by a" have nothing to do with programming techniques. It's a way humans are used to think about "stuff to do" in "steps". Our computers are designed this way - no matter what language / paradigm you use, down bottom it compiles to some sort of machine code, which is inherently procedural and linear. Turing machines, the universal model of computation, are as linear as you can get. OTOH, programming techniques like functional, logical and OO are just different ways to implement algorithms. Some of the repliers raised the issue of different (non procedural) representation of algorithms. That's curious, but still probably less useful to people, who are "designed" to think in a procedural way about solving problems.	[reply]

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Re^2: coding of algorithms is inherently procedural
by spurperl (Priest) on May 19, 2005 at 05:12 UTC

We should separate two things: algorithms and programming techniques. Algorithms like "to solve ax = c for x, divide c by a" have nothing to do with programming techniques. It's a way humans are used to think about "stuff to do" in "steps". Our computers are designed this way - no matter what language / paradigm you use, down bottom it compiles to some sort of machine code, which is inherently procedural and linear. Turing machines, the universal model of computation, are as linear as you can get.

OTOH, programming techniques like functional, logical and OO are just different ways to *implement* algorithms. Some of the repliers raised the issue of different (non procedural) representation of algorithms. That's curious, but still probably less useful to people, who are "designed" to think in a procedural way about solving problems.

[reply]