Application and Limits (Unit 06)

Application and limitations of Procedural, Event Driven and Object Oriented programming

Procedural

This is programming that is structured and it works step by step, it requires a sequence of steps in order to make it work. This allows it to tell the computer when certain steps need to be done and in what order. Examples of procedural programming languages are C, Pascal and BASIC.

Application: Procedural programming can be used to help solve calculations for scientific and engineering uses.

Limitation: Once details have been modified it can be very difficult to change those details due to the layout. This requires you to go through the whole program to find what you are looking for.

Event Driven

This is programming which allows programs to respond to many different events. The flow of the program is determined by the events that occur. These events can occur due to input devices, sensors and timers. These can generally be made using any programming language but benefit certain programming languages more than others.

Application: Event driven programs are interactive programs which are very important for user based programs as most modern GUI programs use event driven programming.

Limitations: Event driven programs often require large amounts of processing power due to constantly active loops.

Object Oriented

This form of programming is based around objects rather than actions, data and logic. These objects are data structures that contain data in the form of fields. An objects procedures can access and modify data within fields. Most object oriented languages are class-based which means that objects are instances of classes  which typically determine their type.

Application: It is easier to change codes and modify them. This encourages programmers to code in classes so the code is less directly accessible by the computer system. The data is accessed by calling specially written functions which are methods.

Limitations: Object oriented programs are typically larger in file size due to a large amount of code needed to make standard applications. This means they are likely to run slower and require more memory.