On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Mikael B <mba...@live.se> wrote: > > > > > > > That's from the functional programming crowd. > > > > Python isn't a functional language. > > > A noob question: what is a functional language? What does it meen? > > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > > It's a language where executing a program is equivalent to evaluating a function - so things that are usually statements, like "if" statements, are expressions that return a value.
Pure functional languages have functions with no side effects, at least, not unless a monad (side effect detected by the type system in this case) catches it somehow. The coolest thing about pure functional languages, is you can give them a debugger that allows you to step backward in time. They're also very parallelisable in theory, because they yield programs with little to no shared, mutable state - which is important given that multicore is catching on so fast.
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