declarative language

A general term for a relational language or a functionallanguage, as opposed to an imperative language. Imperative

(or procedural) languages specify explicit sequences of steps

to follow to produce a result, while declarative languages

describe relationships between variables in terms of functions

or inference rules and the language executor (interpreter

or compiler) applies some fixed algorithm to these

relations to produce a result. The most common examples of

declarative languages are logic programming languages such

as Prolog and functional languages like Haskell.

See also production system.

(1994-11-23)