Rob Thorpe wrote: > Once you can do the above then you can phrase programs entirely in > terms of composition of functions, which is what functional programming > is about.
There are many aspects to functional programming. Some languages (like Lisp and Python) are very impure and hardly encourage functional programming. Other languages (like OCaml, SML, F# and Scheme) are impure but make functional programming easy (e.g. higher-order functions, currying, continuation passing style are all concise and statically checked). Some languages (like Haskell) are purely functional, so everything must be immutable. > Getting good performance though is problematic without being able to > evaluate parts at compile time. This is why almost all functional > languages provide that feature in some form. Actually the languages that don't provide compile-time execution (OCaml, SML and F#) are typically much faster than those that do (Lisp, Scheme, Dylan). -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Objective CAML for Scientists http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
