On 16/10/2010 09:02 AM, Stephen Tetley wrote:
On 16 October 2010 08:09, Colin Paul Adams<co...@colina.demon.co.uk> wrote:
And "purely functional programming language"?
If they mean anything to many people, it's that the language works
(i.e. functions). What language wouldn't work?
I think Ben has a strong point here.
If a "functional language" doesn't mean anything significant then
Haskell probably isn't the language you should be choosing.
By that rationale, I should never have chosen Haskell. (I'm really glad
I did though...)
In the UK some time before Haskell, I believe there was some effort to
re-brand "functional programming" to "applicative programming" to make
a distinction with functional - "actually works!" - and (first order-)
functions in C or Pascal that were like procedures but returned a
result. This was before my time, but I'm sure I saw evidence in
reports at my old university library for grant proposals / research
awards to put applicative programming on parallel machines.
I've always thought "function-oriented programming" (by analogy to
"object-oriented programming") to be a far more illunimating term. But
of course, as son as you do that, anybody who knows about "functional
programming" will wonder if "function-oriented programming" is a
different animal somehow... It seems that for good or ill, we're stuck
with the existing terminology.
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