> More than 20 years history to that concept, I think. ...................
John Backus in his now classic 1977 ACM Turing Award Lecture, where he defined the FP language and an algebra of programs http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf made a very strong case of functional programming without variables. (To the interested, I'd also highly recommend seeing Backus's lecture on FL, the FP's successor -- a video lecture from 1987! -- available at http://www.archive.org/details/JohnBack1987 .) So variable-free (including argument-free) programming is at least 35 years old now. Since then, much research has gone into discovering general patterns of recursion which, once incorporated in the language, obviate the need for direct use of recursion. See e.g. this other classic -- the 'bananas' article: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.125 . One can observe similarities between the variable-free styles of array languages and other functional languages, but in general -- and perhaps regretably -- there hasn't been much communication between the two. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
