On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Boyko Bantchev <[email protected]> wrote: > On 15 February 2013 21:10, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: >> .... But, since you have never told me what you do mean I am left >> without any useful approach for understanding the concepts you are >> referring to. I would like it if, at some point, you supplied some >> definitions for the meanings of some of the words you use where I have >> expressed that I think the relevant definition is different. > > I am quite sure you did perfectly understand all that I said in > my first post in the thread, including what I mean by 'function': > a subprogram that returns a value.
Ok. > This definition is widely accepted in programming, including functional. No. With this definition, all programming is "functional programming", and there's no distinction between "imperative programming" and "functional programming". In other words, with this definition the phrase "functional programming" carries no significance. > Of course this usage of the word is not the same as in mathematics, and it > needs > not be. Functions in programming are *never* those of mathematics. There is never any reason to use trivial labels that carry no information > And, again, your attempts at discussing what a function is, or what > you want it to be, are irrelevant to my remark on closures, let alone > to refuting it, so I don't see your point. Petty nagging, as usual? At this point, I think I will refer you to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming The opening sentence, there, is "In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data." It might seem relevant, to you, to ascribe this concept as some kind of personal failing on my part, but frankly I do not have any way of participating meaningfully in that kind of discussion. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
