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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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