Editing Program counter (section)

== Consequences in high-level programming ==
Modern high-level [[programming language]]s still follow the sequential-execution model and, indeed, a common way of identifying programming errors is with a “procedure execution” in which the programmer's finger identifies the point of execution as a PC would.  The high-level language is essentially the machine language of a virtual machine,<ref name="Hofstadter_1980" /> too complex to be built as hardware but instead emulated or [[interpreter (computing)|interpreted]] by software.

However, new programming models transcend sequential-execution programming:

* When writing a [[thread (computing)|multi-threaded]] program, the programmer may write each thread as a sequence of instructions without specifying the timing of any instruction relative to instructions in other threads.
* In [[event-driven programming]], the programmer may write sequences of instructions to respond to [[event (computing)|events]] without specifying an overall sequence for the program.
* In [[dataflow programming]], the programmer may write each section of a computing [[pipeline programming|pipeline]] without specifying the timing relative to other sections.