On 9/4/2011 9:13 AM, rusi wrote:
On Sep 3, 9:15 pm, William Gill<nore...@domain.invalid> wrote:
During some recent research, and re-familiarization with Python, I came
across documentation that suggests that programming using functions, and
programming using objects were somehow opposing techniques.
Staying with (for the moment) the suggestion that OO-P and F-P are
complementary, I believe it is worthwhile to distinguish syntactic OO-
P vs F-P from semantic OO-P vs F-P.
Syntactically: f(x) is functional x.f() is object oriented.
Semantically if f's return value depends only on x ie does not depend
on state it is functional (in the math sense) -- the jargon is that f
is referentially transparent.
Not to split hairs, but syntactically f(x) is a function in many
programming paradigms.
As I understand it functional programming places specific requirements
on functions, i.e.referential transparency. So f(x) may or may not be
"functional".
x.f() is also a function, but it is a member of the object x, is
referred to as a 'method' of x, and uses the syntactical "dot" notation
object"dot"function for identification.
Referential opaqueness is usually such a source of problems that it
turns out good to contain the problem somewhat -- hence the wish for
encapsulation.
One can find in the python library itself all 4 combinations:
syntactically and semantically OO : sort
syntactically and semantically FP: sorted
syntactically OO semantically FP: join
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
