Functional vs. Procedural Programming Language Functional vs. Procedural Programming Language Mathematica and Maple are both computer algebra systems that contain underlying progamming languages. The languages are quite different from one another. A basic difference is the difference between procedural and functional styles. The traditional programming languages, which students usually learn first, are procedural languages .
Procedural programming is fine for small projects.
It is the most natural way to tell a computer what to do, and the computer processor's own language, machine code, is procedural, so the translation of the procedural high-level language into machine code is straightforward and efficient. Overall, Maple is a procedural language. It has only a few of the basic functional programming constructs that characterize a functional language and its pattern-matching capabilities are very limited. While they appear non-intuitive to those who have only experienced procedural languages, they provide succinct and natural programming structures for those who gain some experience. It was true that functional programs generally ran more slowly than procedural programs.