1. A new way of programming

1.1 Programming styles

Programming means communicating a request to a machine: we write a program to make a computer perform a certain task. The task in question can be quite complex, and its direct formulation in the language of the machine is out of the question. The program is written in a programming language, whose role is to support the programmer's intellectual effort by providing a more or less comfortable conceptual framework, more or less well adapted to the task to be described. Languages are organized according to several major programming styles, which differ according to the intellectual mechanisms they bring into play in the programmer and the qualities of the formulation obtained from the point of view of its subsequent processing (compilation, execution, debugging,...