[Xotcl] Functional programming?

[Brett Schwarz]

you may want to look here for some ideas:

http://mini.net/tcl/2752.html


    --brett


On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 12:15, Gustaf Neumann wrote:
> On Thursday 16 May 2002 15:16, Rick Hedin wrote:
> > Hello.  My friends are trying to convince me of the value of functional
> > programming.  Writing safer and clearer programs sounds good, but I am not
> > inclined to learn Haskell.
> >
> > Xotcl is a pretty flexible beast.  Can I do functional programming in it?
> > It seems as though classes are a variety of object in Xotcl, so that will
> > be an advantage for passing classes around, but what else am I missing?  I
> > suspect that Gustaf and Uwe thought about functional programming when they
> > designed their beast.  Can I find out what their thoughts were?
> 
>  hi rick,
> 
>  nobody can find out today, what their thoughts really were :)
> 
>  there is no exact answer to your question, here are some
>  random thoughts...
> 
>  well, functional programming is quite different in principle
>  from oo programming which is in turn quite different to say 
>  logic programming. it's not a matter of "power" or "flexibilty",
>  it's a matter, how the matter how one like to think about
>  a certain problem area and what are the primary things of 
>  concern ... well in theory. in practice, many of the pure
>  concepts are sometimes less important.
> 
>     oo: think in things, classify things, encapsulate state,
>         reuse code, build systems
> 
>     functional programming: think in expressions, purists say that
>         variables are not needed, support powerful nice things 
>         with funny names like "list comprehensions", "monads" etc.
> 
>     logic programming: think in logic, expressing relations between
>         things (like grammars), express "truth", don't focus on
>         program flow, try theories
>  
>  you can certainly program in a functional programming style
>  in Tcl or XOTcl, but it does not make this necessarily a functional
>  language. The much rumored "feather" project much more support
>  in this direction. 
> 
>  i am a friend of varieties: use the right tool for the right 
>  task. There are many projects that i would start today in
>  e.g. C, some other in Prolog/clp(R), some in Java or whatever,
>  but most in xotcl (but i am certainly not objective). 
> 
>  There is no way, we could port all nice features of all
>  programming languages to xotcl, and if we would, i am not
>  sure whether i would like the result. xotcl is a theme,
>  a way, we proceed. There are certainly other ways as well,
>  and many of these will be better suited for certain tasks.
> 
>  i would say, listen to your friends, look into haskell,
>  make your own opinion, how you would like to solve your
>  programming tasks, this will help you to make well-founded
>  decisions.
> 
>  I have never used Haskell for anything real. The next best 
>  was APL where i have written various programs; it was
>  quite fun, but i a got the somewhat wrong impression 
>  what computers are for (i thought a computer is primarily
>  is a big, powerful calculator). Today i would say that it is 
>  more important to use a computer to build systems. For this 
>  task, oo is quite ok, i would say....
> 
>  hope this helps a little to make your mind up.
> 
>  greetings
> -gustaf
>  
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-- 
Brett Schwarz
brett_schwarz AT yahoo.com