You are right, this is not the essence of functional programming. Functional and procedural python code would look quite the same (at least in pydoc). It is the implementation of my functions, wether they are functional or procedural. If i use global variables, it is not functional any more.
While python makes it use to work in a functional way, it is nearly impossible to do it exclusive. This is not necessary either, of course ;) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
