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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Global program state.
Message-ID: <330@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 3 Jan 91 07:04:24 GMT
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In article  <27823155.211e@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> John R. Dudeck writes:
]
]In the book, _Principles of Functional Programming_, by Glaser, Hankin,
]& Till, it is stated, "the notion of global state that may change
]arbitrarily at each step of the computation has proved to be both
]intuitively and mathematically intractable."

That is something of an exaggeration.  The mathematics of global
states is almost trivial compared to the mathematics of recursive
functions.

It's hard to argue the "intuitive tractability" of global states, but
clearly the thousands (millions?) of working programs written under
the notion of a global state might be considered a counter-example to
the claim.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman