declarative language

declarative language

[di‚klar·əd·iv ′laŋ·gwij] (computer science) A nonprocedural programming language that allows the programmer to state the task to be accomplished without specifying the procedures needed to carry it out.

declarative language

(language)Any relational language or functional language.These kinds of programming language describe relationshipsbetween variables in terms of functions or inference rules, and the language executor (interpreter orcompiler) applies some fixed algorithm to these relationsto produce a result.

Declarative languages contrast with imperative languageswhich specify explicit manipulation of the computer's internalstate; or procedural languages which specify an explicitsequence of steps to follow.

The most common examples of declarative languages are logic programming languages such as Prolog and functional languages like Haskell.

See also production system.