On Wed, 2019-10-09 at 11:12 -0700, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: […] > Actually, std.functional is somewhat of a misnomer. It mostly deals with > higher-order functions, i.e., functions that return functions, currying, > that sort of thing. These are part of functional programming, but > there's more to functional programming than that. I'd say std.range and > std.algorithm are another major part of functional-style programming > support in D, along with the purity system. […]
I feel that it is best to leave functional programming to functional programming language, e.g. Haskell, Scheme, etc. rather than try to do functional programming in imperative languages, e.g. Java, C++, Rust, D. The reason is things like lazy evaluation and the consistency of everything being a function, etc. The underlying computational models of functional programming languages and imperative programming languages need different mindsets to use well. Witness the issues in using Scala. Having said this, declarative programming can be pursued in functional languages, logic languages (e.g. Prolog), and imperative languages. Tools such as higher order functions are crucial to this, but currying is not, unless it is core to partial evaluation as it is in Haskell. Modern C++, D, Rust – but not Go – all admit programming using a declarative way of working just as Haskell and Scheme do. My experience of emphasising declarative programming in imperative languages is that people build smaller, more comprehensible, and maintainable code that achives the goal compared with using tradition imperative programming. -- Russel. =========================================== Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk
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