A style of programming that concentrates on ''what'' to do, rather than ''how'' to do it.
Contrast with [imperative programming].

Some examples of declarative programming languages:
   * [Functional programming] languages, like [Haskell], ML, etc.
   * [Logic programming] languages, like [Prolog].
   * Various rule-based languages, such as [CLIPS] are primarily declarative, but are often used in a stateful manner.
   * Various procedural markup languages, such as '''compose''' ([Multics]) and the [Unix] '''*roff''' family (nroff, troff, etc.)), are imperative.
   * Various descriptive markup languages, such as [HTML] and [SGML] (from which [XML] was derived) are declarative (ish -- again, this is often not the case in practice).
[XSLT] could indeed be called an XML-based, declarative and functional programming language.

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