Procedural languages are computer languages used to define the actions that a computer has to follow to solve a problem. Although it would be convenient for people to give computers instructions in a natural language, such as English, French, or Chinese, they cannot because computers are just too inflexible to understand the subtleties of human communication. Human intelligence can work out the ambiguities of a natural language, but a computer requires a rigid, mathematically precise communication system: each symbol, or group of symbols, must mean exactly the same thing every time.

Computer scientists have created artificial languages that enable programmers to assemble a set of commands for the machine without dealing directly with strings of binary digits. The high-level form of a procedural language frees a programmer from the time-consuming chore of expressing algorithms in lower-level languages such as assembly and machine language. Additionally...