Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

1.1. Different Programming Models

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

—Edsgar Dijkstra

There are many models of programming. Procedural programming languages use a sequence of procedural steps guided by flow of control statements (WHILE-DO, IF-THEN-ELSE, and BEGIN-END) that change the input data to output data. This was the traditional view of programming, and it is often called the von Neumann Model after John von Neumann, the mathematician who was responsible for it. The same source code runs through the same compiler and generates the same executable module every time. The same program will work exactly the same way every time it is invoked. The keywords in this model are predictable and deterministic. It is also subject ...