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Re: Return
From: |
David Kastrup |
Subject: |
Re: Return |
Date: |
Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:00:17 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
> MON KEY writes:
>
> > Indeed, one often doesn't miss what one never knew wasn't there to
> > be missed.
> > GVM has no doubt leveraged this against future Python initiates.
>
> Not at all. Python is intended to have functional programming
> features, but it's also intended to primarily be an imperative
> language, not a functional language.
If you take a look at Elisp programs, you'll notice that in practice it
is primarily used as an imperative language, not a functional language
(that is: the focus is on executing actions, not on constructing
values). It doesn't really help that the fundamental data structure,
the list, is not an abstract data type but realised via a rather
low-level pointer to a statically allocated pair of user-accessible
values, cutting right through the idea of "functional programming" where
the output is a mathematic function/transformation of the input.
Lisp does not have separate syntaxes for imperative execution and
expressions (and things like the C dichotomy of if/else/?: are somewhat
ugly, especially considering that expressions count as statements if you
tack a semicolon on). But particularly the Emacs code base is not all
that "functional".
--
David Kastrup
- Re: return, (continued)
- Re: Return, MON KEY, 2010/12/05
- Re: Return, Miles Bader, 2010/12/06
- Re: Return, David Kastrup, 2010/12/07
- Re: Return, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/07
- Re: Return, David Kastrup, 2010/12/07
- Re: Return, Fren Zeee, 2010/12/08
- Re: Return, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/09