RE: What's so cool about Scheme?

[Mike Newhall <address@hidden>]

>Of course, real functional languages have data types other than functions,
>and so presumably could get away without HO functions, in theory.  But that
>would prevent many of the things which a pure functional language allows:
>operations such as maps and folds would have to be implemented iteratively,
>for example.

	Ah, perhaps this is the rub: pure functional languages allow higher-order functions *and* side-effect-free programming.  A dynamic language offers higher-order functions as a natural side-effect of code=data, without necessarily saying anything about the language's support for side-effect-free programming.