On 2006-12-17 07:54:28 -0500, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > What if eager impurity isn't the "very nature" of the problem but, rather, > is the very nature of Tilton's chosen solution?
That's the whole point which you keep missing - that a programming language is expressive precisely to the extent that it allows you to express the solution in the *programmer's* chosen form, not the paradigm imposed by the language. You look down your nose at cells, but if that's the way kenny conceived of the problem - as a graph of changing state, why should he be forced to reconceptualize it according to someone else's notion of programming correctness (be that pure functional or any other paradigm)? By asking this question you've implicitly admitted that to solve it *as he thought of it* in a pure functional language would require reconceptualizing it (i.e., the aforementioned "jumping through hoops"). We don't want to reconceptualize everything according to a particular paradigm, we want the flexibility to write the solution to the problem in the terms we think and talk about it, not the procrustean bed of pure functional semantics. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list