See, for instance About Haskell. Personally, I think of "functional programming" as a style of programming that doesn't do much in the way of assignment or iteration and treats functions as first-class values: for instance, functions can take functions as parameters and return other functions. An example might be Specializing Functions with Currying. Most functional languages are really good at list processing, Lisp being the canonical example.

--
Yours in pedantry,
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
"Lines of code don't matter as long as I'm not writing them." -- merlyn

In reply to Re: regex and "Functional Programming" by FoxtrotUniform
in thread regex and "Functional Programming" by perlcapt

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