Comment by adrian_b

Anything that causes a persistent change of the state of a system is imperative, regardless of how detailed the command is.

  printf("Hello world!");

also does not tell anything to the system about how to accomplish this.

Anyone who claims that an SQL command like insert a row, create a table or destroy a table is not imperative, is just plainly wrong.

Even in real life, when humans communicate commands to each other, from where the term "imperative" comes, the commands normally do not tell anything to the recipient about how to accomplish the order, they just name the action, because it is supposed that whoever receives the command knows how to do it.

After programming languages were invented there was a clear partition between commands a.k.a. imperative statements, expressions and definitions a.k.a. declarations ("definition" and "declaration" were originally synonymous terms, "declaration" being the ALGOL 60 term and "definition" being the CPL term; the use of the 2 words with different meanings, like in C, where it is required by a defect of the compiler, which needs additional declarations besides a definition, is only recent.)

Later the meanings of these terms have become muddled by their careless use by many authors, which usually had political reasons, i.e. because they somehow considered the words "imperative" or "command" as shameful, they attempted to present their pet languages as purely functional or purely declarative, so they twisted the words in various ways, despite the fact that any practical program must contain imperative parts, not only functional or declarative parts.

Imperative languages such as C/C++ specify "microtransactions" - an ordering over memory accesses (including (de)allocations) within some statement or group of statements.

Compilers are free to rearrange these accesses if the final result is same as if executed by these ordered microtransactions.

Consider loop fusion, loop splitting and/or loop skewing.

This just exposes how weak this definition of declarative is, I think. Or how it's carrying two meanings here.

What you're really talking about is one of the things Codd wanted to emphasize: representational independence. Which actually was the primary thrust of his famous paper: the user should not need to know how the data is stored in order to use or manipulate it.

The other thing that people are talking about with "declarative" is probably another level up in abstraction. Talking about the business logic or problem in terms that are closer to logic than a sequence of instructions, and then letting the machine sort out what those steps are.

Consider in a Datalog users don't customarily perform DDL type operations; they declare data rules and the system decides the form of the underlying relations. That's a small step up the declarative ladder from SQL, even if it's somewhat analogous to "create view".

So I think there's a blurry definitional line between the two. But I don't think your very blunt "No." is doing much to help clear that up?

"how to accomplish the thing."

I always thought this was splitting hairs.

C#,C++, Java seems imperative. You are in control? But you aren't really telling it how to move values between registers, the compiler is making a million decisions for you on how the computer will execute that 'imperative' code. Just like SQL isn't really telling the DB how to do it either..