Re: functions, opinion...

"Dvdmandt" <dvdmandt@telia.com> wrote in message news:20030617043209.82068.qmail@pb1.pair.com... > > Now, where did those two paragraphs come from? A bit of experience with all > those langs and the BASIC school... I'm at the age of 14 and don't even know > math yet so (I mean, I know +, -, / and *, but not advanced stuff)... "functional programming" is based around the idea that subroutines should have no side effects - all the information a subroutine needs should be passed as parameters, and its results should be returned. Further, a function called with the same set of parameters should always return the same result. The original basis for this was that it made program analysis much simpler; however, it was found to be useful in practice as well for a number of reasons: - it was a means of enforcing variable scope (essentially, all variables are local), - it promotes much simpler functions and more reuse. - it can allow much more extreme compiler optimizations While the functional programming philosophy can be applied in most programming languages, some of the languages I mentioned do a better job of making its usefulness obvious. For more info, see some of the links at http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/Functional/ -- Hugh Bothwell hugh_bothwell@hotmail.com Kingston ON Canada v3.1 GCS/E/AT d- s+: a- C+++ L++>+++$ P+ E- W+++$ N++ K? w++ M PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP+ t-- 5++ !X R+ tv b++++ DI+++ D-(++) G+ e(++) h-- r- y+