Of what use is 'lambda'???
Suchandra Thapa
ssthapa at harper.uchicago.edu
Tue Sep 26 03:29:59 EDT 2000
Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab at bright.net> wrote:
>I have a question. What is the difference between functional
>programming and procedural programming? I know I should know
>this, but...
Functional programming consists of writing programs using functions
which depend only on their inputs. E.g. if you have a function foo(x, y)
then calling foo(2, 2) always gives the same return value. This implies
that foo can't depend on any state information since if foo also depends
on a variable bar then the return value of foo(2, 2) may not be the same as
it was previously if bar changes. As a rule of thumb, functional languages
don't allow or heavily discourage you from changing the value of a variable
once you've declared the value to be something.
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Suchandra S. Thapa
s-thapa at uchicago.edu
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