Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: comp.lang.functional
Message-ID: <1816@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 22 Feb 90 19:28:13 GMT
References: <1619@husc6.harvard.edu> <1797@skye.ed.ac.uk> <5144@brazos.Rice.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 20

In article <5144@brazos.Rice.edu> dorai@helma.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram) writes:
 >I'm tentatively in favor too; however, "functional" is about the most
 >ambivalent, and consequently useless, term in programming languages.
 >The two common (often incompatible) views seem to be

 >i) A language which has higher-order functions;
 >ii) Ditto, but which very definitely eschews "assignment."

 >Thus we have the paradox of Scheme and ML being both "imperative"
 >("non-functional," taking definition ii)) as well as "functional"
 >(taking definition i)).

I don't think this is a problem, even if we accept (ii).  Neither
Scheme nor ML are strictly functional.  However, both have an
interesting functional subset.

However, I don't think definition (i) is correct.  A (wimpy)
functional language might not have higher-order functions.  Functional
languages are applicative languages, ie ones w/o side-effects (think
of mathematical functions).