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Re: No side effects holy cow. ( Re: process order (still...)

Subject: Re: No side effects holy cow. ( Re: process order (still...) )
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 19:34:24 +0100 (BST)
holy cow expression
Arguing about language design is almost as fruitless as arguing
whether Microsoft is an agent of the Evil Empire. (But almost as much
fun:-)

Personally I find XSL, Standard ML, pure subset of lisp etc just much
easier to understand. I get worried using a language where in an
expression like  f(x) + f(y) the function f, applied to x, can change the
value of y so affect the other term of the expression.
I just don't know how to understand such expressions. (Although clearly
people do)

I understand that it's harder to write compilers for these kinds of
languages, but that's the normal way of progress in computing
you start off having to warp your methods to fit the capabilities of the
machine, but as machines become more powerful it becomes more reasonable
to use more natural methods of expression, and let the compiler writers
worry about the details. Imperative programming seems that way to me,
unnatural but necessary at times due to the limitations of the
underlying machine.

So, I don't have a parallel machine, but I still prefer a functional
language approach to programming.

It's not as if its the end of the world if you don't like this style and
need to transform some documents, there's omnimark, or perl's xml
modules, or any one of dozens of alternatives.

Having argued for the functional style I have to accept that
I've probably programmed more lines of TeX than anything else in recent
years. TeX as a programming language isn't functional in style at all.
Perhaps the above is all self delusion, and it's just that I am
attracted to bizarre non standard languages.

David


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