On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 12:32:09PM -0400, Matthew Danish wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 09:09:31AM -0700, XenWryla LeFae wrote:
[something which doesn't seem to mention "functional language" in
the excerpted part, but I assume did somewhere in the original message]
> Oh, and Lisp isn't a functional language, it's an interactive language.
> You'll learn this pretty soon as you start playing with it.
It depends on what you mean by functional language, I think.
definition 1: CL is not a functional programming language because it's
possible to write CL programs in a nonfunctional style.
definition 2: CL is a functional programming language because it's
possible to write arbitrarily complicated functional
programs directly in CL. ("directly" = without writing
a preprocessor or jumping through a bunch of hoops to
manually emulate lexical closures and GC)
It is true that CL (and ML and Scheme) don't directly support lazy
evaluation, and without that it's hard to do some things in a purely
functional style. But I think a definition of functional languages
which lumps CL, ML, and Scheme together with C++, C, Pascal, and
Fortran as "not functional languages" is not universal usage. My
casual impression is that definition 2 is about as common as
definition 1, and that when people want to be precise about meaning
definition 1, they say "pure functional language".
--
William Harold Newman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
C'mon. I just thought of that off the top of my head and no XP genius
can figure this out? Please.
-- <http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2662&page=2>
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