clipka wrote:

> What - a functional language without lambda functions? C'mon, I always thought
> that was the icing on the cake...

It's nice to have, but you can live without it. Debatably, not having it 
makes things more explicit. In the language I'm designing, you basically 
always have to give a function a name before you can call it.

FWIW, I've always thought of curried functions as a syntactic short-cut 
as well. It turns out I was wrong; without curried functions, there are 
certain programs you actually can't write.

I'm ambivilent about these design choices. I'm still playing with my 
options...

(As already stated, no curried functions prevents the definition of 
certain operations. Additionally, not having lambda functions and 
curried functions means that creating functions is more hard work, and 
this somewhat tips the balance of power. It makes you more likely to 
define functions directly rather than as special cases of high-order 
functions, because it's almost more work to call a high-order function 
than to type in the definition directly. This is possibly not a good 
idea...)

> I'd love to see such a functional language. Maybe it would help me grok the
> concept, too - it somehow feels that functional programming concepts may really
> be useful, and that I just didn't manage to really grasp the concepts.
> 
> And I mean grasp, not just comprehend from a theoretical point of view.

Well, we'll see. It may be that having everything explicitly spelled out 
makes it clearer what's actually going on.

Alternatively, maybe all the syntactic chatter will be so OTT that it 
just obscures the meaning.

Or maybe the fundamental problem is that functional programming is just 
weird, and no amount of dressing it up will solve that. We'll see... ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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