On Sun, 5 Dec 2004, Matthew Walton wrote:
At least we had the sense to call them subroutines instead of functions. Of course, that also upset the mathematicians, who wanted to call them functions anyway. Go figure.
That might be because the mathematicians haven't heard of a variant of a function which is allowed to have side effects yet.
More or less BS for, from the point of view of a mathematitian (i.e. from the point of view of Mathematics), you still have "true functions", they're either not just the *same* function each time, or the same function with some arguments/parameters set to different values (that in the implementation are passed implicitly rather than explicitly), which are fundamentally the same thing after all (up to an isomorphism, that is).
Michele -- I find the line "I am not pestering anybody, I am asking questions on usenet. That's what usenet is for." a classic. It's like "I am not talking to you, I am just opening and closing my mouth while standing close to you. That's what a mouth is for." - David Kastrup, on comp.text.tex (slightly edited)
