Re: Can a functional language be sequential?

["Michael St . Hippolyte" <address@hidden>]

On 2003.06.01 17:13 andrew cooke wrote:
> 
> as far as i can tell, your programs do have side effects, just as many
> functional programs have side effects - they change the state of the
> "world" by doing output operations.  since the order of output is
> generally important, functional languages need to sequence events just
> as much as imperative ones.  (ok, i know you probably meant side
> effects within the program).

Yes, Bento connects very easily to the outside world, and once you do
side effects are unavoidable.  This would be true of any functional
language capable of calling external methods, no?  I'm assuming that
such real-world exceptions are accepted by real-world functional
programmers -- it would be hard to do many useful things otherwise.


> since people often (i just did) refer to scheme as a functional
> language, despite having operations on mutable state, i'm sure bento
> can make the claim ;o)

If I can state with accuracy "Bento is a functional language like
Scheme is" I'll be satisfied :)

Michael


> cheers,
> andrew
> 
> --
> http://www.acooke.org
> 
> 
-----------------------------
Michael St. Hippolyte
http://www.bentodev.org