Invisible wrote:
>>> But alas, it's not purely functional,
>>
>> Yeah. I don't think you could get a real distributed language with 
>> everything being truly functional, could you?
> 
> Um... why?

Because it's nondeterministic? It's I/O driven? It's asynchronous?

I mean, to the extent that you think a tail-recursive function accepting 
asynchronous messages and sending asynchronous messages in return can be 
"functional," then it looks like Erlang is functional.

>> I mean, what's the functional equivalent of "the machine running the 
>> calculation just burst into flames"? :-)
> 
> Throwing an exception, as a guess. Like a division by zero error, but 
> less deterministic. (??!?!) ;-)

Who throws the exception? The machine running the calculation isn't in 
any shape to do so.

>> What's the functional equivalent of "we've just released a new version 
>> of this function"?
> 
> Now that's an interesting question...

Let me know when you figure it out. ;-)

>>> and the general style just seemed untidy and complicated. It's just 
>>> not my cup of tea...
>>
>> Yep. Altho the language itself seems pretty simple and straightforward, 
> 
> If by "simple and straight forward" you mean "assumes referential 
> transparency but doesn't actually enforce it or make any attempt to 
> check that it's there", then sure. Go knock yourself out. ;-)

Where do you think it doesn't assume referential transparency?

By "simple and straightforward" I meant in the sense that there are 
relatively few types and primitives and interactions between them. More 
like Tcl or C than Ada or C++.

> Gotta love documentation where you can't figure out what order to read 
> it in...

It's not unusual. It's how I learned most of the languages I know. But 
then, most of the languages I learned that way didn't have 1500+ pages 
of documentation for the libraries. :-)  A two-pass read of the library 
docs is going to take a while.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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