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Re: OT: functional languages (was: Politics of Java)



On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 03:17:42PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
| also sprach Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu> [2002.12.13.1443 +0100]:
| > what do you mean by "functional"?  even though i have quite limited
| > experience with it, i've certainly seen plugins for the GIMP and
| > things written in it.  Or maybe that was scheme.
| 
| while C is an imperative language, Erlang is a functional or
| procedural language. (correct me if i am wrong, folks).

"imperative" and "procedural" are the same thing, and C is a prime
example.  It is such because the structure of a C program is a
collection of procedures which start with "main".  Each procedure is a
linear list of statements to be executed in order.

| it has no loops, assignments, variables or whatever.
| 
| Since Lisp is very similar, I was wondering if it's also "functional"...

Lisp is "functional".  The functional paradigm is based entirely on
functions.  A function receives some input values (arguments) and
returns some value.  It is based heavily on discrete mathmatics and
recursion.

The other two categories of programming languages are OO
(object-oriented) and Logic.  Python, C++ and Java are OO languages.
Prolog is a logic based language.

-D

-- 
Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and your plans will succeed.
        Proverbs 16:3
 
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/

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