Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > I thought the opposite of “functional” was “procedural”, not “imperative”. > The opposite to the latter is “declarative”. But (nearly) all procedural > languages also have declarative constructs, not just imperative ones > (certainly Python does). Presumably an “imperative” language would not.
Offhand I can't tell that imperative and procedural mean something different. Both basically mean that the programmer specifies a series of steps for the computer to carry out. Functional languages are mostly declarative; for example, an expression like x = 3 is called an "equation" rather than an "assignment". It declares "x is equal to 3", rather than directing x to be set to 3. If someplace else in the program you say "x = 4", that is an error, normally caught by the compiler, since x cannot be equal to both 3 and 4. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
