The lineages of C and C++ both trace their lineage back to the ALGOL programming language, which saw its first version in 1958 (ALGOL 58), followed by updates in 1960 and 1968. ALGOL introduced the concept of imperative programming—a programming style in which statements explicitly tell the machine how to make changes to data for output and control flow.
A paradigm that emerges rather naturally from imperative programming is theuse of procedures. We will start with an example, to introduce the terminology. Procedures are synonymous to sub-routines and functions. They identify the groups of statements and make them self-contained, which has the effects of confiningthereachofthese statements to the limited scope of the section they are contained within, creating hierarchy and consequentially introducing these procedures as new, more abstract statements. Heavy use of this procedural programming style finds its place in so-called structured programming, alongside loop and branching...
