Rainer Grimm wrote: > I think it's relatively difficult to get a feeling what a are the key > points behind functional programming. So I think you should start > explaining the concepts behind functional programming. A few ideas. > - higher order functions > - first class functions > - currying > - pure functions > - list processing > - lambda functions > - recursion instead of iteration > - pattern matching
Avoiding global state. Including singletons *wink* Lazy data processing, including infinite data streams. Decorators. Iterators. Using iterators as a form of pipelining. Some of these might not count as strictly functional in the lambda calculus sense, but they're closely related and less academic and more practical. > And that should end with the three guys (map, filter and reduce ) as > building blocks of functional programming. And that is a good point to > introduce list comprehension. Because it's only syntactic sugar for map > filter. But what kind of sugar. It's very impressive. Thats my typical way > to introduce it in seminars. If it were me, I'd probably take a less pure approach and concentrate on concrete examples. As far as Python goes, the use of list comps/generator expressions, iterators and decorators are the main functional idioms, not so much map, filter and especially reduce, which only avoided being removed from Python 3 by the narrowest margin. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
