is list comprehension necessary?

[Dan Stromberg]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Mikael B <mback1 at live.se> wrote:

>
>
>
> >
> > That's from the functional programming crowd.
> >
> > Python isn't a functional language.
>
>
> A noob question: what is a functional language?  What does it meen?
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
>
It's a language where executing a program is equivalent to evaluating a
function - so things that are usually statements, like "if" statements, are
expressions that return a value.

Pure functional languages have functions with no side effects, at least, not
unless a monad (side effect detected by the type system in this case)
catches it somehow.

The coolest thing about pure functional languages, is you can give them a
debugger that allows you to step backward in time.  They're also very
parallelisable in theory, because they yield programs with little to no
shared, mutable state - which is important given that multicore is catching
on so fast.
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