A decomposition paradigm in computer programming is a strategy for organizing a program as a number of parts, and it usually implies also a specific way to organize a program text.

Usually the aim of using a decomposition paradigm is to optimize some metric related to program complexity, for example the modularity of the program, or its maintainability.

Most decomposition paradigms suggest to decompose a program in parts so as to minimize the static dependencies among those parts, and to maximize the cohesiveness of each part.

Some popular decomposition paradigms are the procedural, modules, abstract data type and object oriented ones.

The concept of decomposition paradigm is entirely independent and different from that of model of computation, but the two are often confused, most often in the cases of the functional model of computation being confused with procedural decomposition, and of the actor model of computation being confused with object oriented decomposition.

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