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From: gkj@doc.ic.ac.uk (Guido K Jouret)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Let's replace the name "functional"
Message-ID: <1925@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: 25 May 90 08:12:37 GMT
References: <1990May15.152529.7427@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: gkj@doc.ic.ac.uk (Guido K Jouret)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
Lines: 49

In article <1990May15.152529.7427@watdragon.waterloo.edu> gvcormack@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Gordon V. Cormack) writes:

[verbiage deleted]

>I would like to see suggestions for words to describe:
>
>   (a) programming or programming languages in which function 
>       abstraction and application completely replace any notion of
>       state.  
>
>   (b) programming or programming languages in which higher order
>       functions (value-returning procedures if you prefer) are
>       used extensively. 
>
>I believe "pure functional" or "applicative" both describe (a)
>unambiguously.  There appears to be no widely accepted term for (b),
>even though (b) is a very important programming methodology/language 
>design issue.
>
>So, you purists that take "functional" to mean "pure functional", what
>do you call (b).  I'm not particularly interested in Orwellian
>arguments that say I shouldn't be able to express such a concept.
>
>Here is a test for your new phrase.  Substituting it for X below should
>yield a true statement.
>
>   FP, Miranda, Scheme and ML are X, but 
>	      Ada, Fortran, and C are not X.

Yawn...

Anybody care to define the expression "to flog a dead horse" in
a functional context?  Anybody aside from dedicated sophists really think
that exercises like this are useful, informative, conclusive, or likely to
instantaneous peace, happiness, and nirvana?

Yo!  'nuff said already.

Guido...

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