Re: Return type of procedures?

[John Max Skaller <skaller@maxtal.com.au>]

David McClain wrote:
> 
> Is it just me? I am quite troubled by the concepts you propose in a new
> language. You chose to use Caml for very good reasons. Why would you do away
> with things like immutable global environments for your users? Procedures
> altering the environment in such a way as to cause a function to behave
> differently on separate invocations seems like it is going against the basic
> tenets of FP. The FP approach makes it so easy to reason about the behavior
> of programs. Partial evaluation allows customization of functions when
> needed. Am I missing something here?

Yes: I am required to interface to an existing object oriented
event driven system. There is an intrinsic requirement to be able
to modify 'state'. In addition, I have to provide a language that
other people (familiar with C/C++) can use.

But the other thing you miss is that even in ocaml, environments
are NOT immutable: there are mutable fields, and thus mutable
data structures like Hashtbl. The fact is, some things are easier
to express in a stateful manner than a functional one.


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John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
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