Todd Jonker wrote:
Hey Todd, thanks for writing this up. I've heard of FP before and others have explained it but this one really cinched it for me. (Or maybe I was just ready to understand it this time.)On 2/11/03 7:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Can you briefly clarify "Functional Model" (even with just a link to somewhere else) since it can be easily confused with other definitions of functional programming? -MarkGood question, Mark. I'll do my best without digging too deep into the COMP411 archive...
I don't know if it qualifies as a "functional programming language", but I've just recently learned that Python treats functions as first class objects which can be declared anonymously and passed around as any other value. It is also a respectable OO scripting language in its own right.In the real world, however, imperative languages reign, and there are relatively few purely-functional languages, and not a one that's commonly used outside of academia. They _are_ used quite a bit in academia, since they allow for very complete and rigorous mathematical models and analyses, useful for things like proving correctness of programs. The Lambda Calculus is in fact very widely used means of defining the semantics of programming languages, whether they by functional or imperative or "other". There are, however, quite a few "mostly functional" languages that provide imperative features, but where the bulk of the programming is typically done in a functional way. Lisp, Scheme, and ML all fall into this category... In those languges the use of an assignment is a pretty rare sighting. [ Most OO languages are pretty aggressively imperative. It's damn near impossible to write a useful Java program without using an assignment. ]
I think it lets you take a FP paradigm approach but does not require it of you.
Erik
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