Of what use is 'lambda'???

[Suchandra Thapa]

In comp.lang.python, you wrote:
>In article <cFAz5.908$ve5.58359 at news-east.usenetserver.com>, Kragen Sitaker
>  wrote:
>
>>>In a functional language, unlike C or Python, there are no side
>>>effects;
>>
>>Which means that if something doesn't return a value you care about,
>>you might as well not have executed it.
>
>Which means that you can not do things like like file-system or
>network operations (or even console I/O) in a strictly
>functionaly language.   Right?

    Actually you can.  By introducing monads a pure functional language
like Haskell can allow the user to change the state of the world.  You
can even do gui apps in a pure functional language since gui interfaces to
libraries like gtk are available for haskell.


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Suchandra S. Thapa 
s-thapa at uchicago.edu

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