On Wednesday 06 May 2015 14:47, Rustom Mody wrote: > It strikes me that the FP crowd has stretched the notion of function > beyond recognition And the imperative/OO folks have distorted it beyond > redemption.
In what way? > And the middle road shown by Pascal has been overgrown with weeds for some > 40 years... As much as I like Pascal, and am pleased to see someone defending it, I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean by this. > If the classic Pascal (or Fortran or Basic) sibling balanced abstractions > of function-for-value procedure-for-effect were more in the collective > consciousness rather than C's travesty of function, things might not have > been so messy. I'm not really sure that having distinct procedures, as opposed to functions that you just ignore their return result, makes *such* a big difference. Can you explain what is the difference between these? sort(stuff) # A procedure. sort(stuff) # ignore the function return result And why the first is so much better than the second? > Well... Dont feel right bashing C without some history... > > C didn't start the mess of mixing procedure and function -- Lisp/Apl did. > Nor the confusion of = for assignment; Fortran did that. Pardon, but = has been used for "assignment" for centuries, long before George Boole and Ada Lovelace even started working on computer theory. Just ask mathematicians: "let y = 23" Is that not a form of assignment? -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
