Functional programming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Saved by 5 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-12-20
- Ferrari on 2008-05-11 - Tags programming , FP
- Ratbeard on 2007-10-09 - Tags programming
- Yorkjong on 2007-07-01 - Tags functional , programming
- Eliazar on 2006-12-20 - Tags imported:del.icio.us , linkstream , toread
- Magoth on 2006-11-12 - Tags programming , functional-programming
Public Sticky notes
Functions are higher-order when they can take other functions as arguments, and return them as results. (The derivative and antiderivative in calculus are examples of this.)
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The distinction between the two is subtle: "higher-order" describes a mathematical concept of functions that operate on other functions, while "first-class" is a computer science term that describes programming language entities that have no restriction on their use
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While most compilers for imperative programming languages detect pure functions, and perform common subexpression elimination for pure function calls
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Strict evaluation has efficiency advantages.
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Lambda calculus provides a stronger theoretic foundation for languages that employ non-strict evaluation.[11] Also non-strict evaluation provides for a more expressive language. For example, it supports infinite data structures, such as a list of all prime numbers (such structures are of use when an indefinite but finite part of the structure is required).
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Recursion may require maintaining a stack, but tail recursion can be recognized and optimized by a compiler into the same code used to implement iteration in imperative languages.
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Common patterns of recursion can be factored out using higher order functions
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Such higher order functions play a role analogous to built-in control structures such as loops in imperative languages.
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The most significant differences stem from the fact that functional programming avoids side effects, which are used in imperative programming to implement state and I/O.
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Where a traditional imperative program might use a loop to traverse a list, a functional style would often use a higher-order function, map, that takes as arguments a function and a list, applies the function to each element of the list, and returns a list of the results.
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