Thankyou for that last sentance! That is the first time in nearly 4 months of looking that I have seen, what appears to be--on the surface at least--a good reason for wanting to use "the style of programming which is free of both assignment statements and side effects".

Look into Erlang. It is a highly concurrent language which looks a lot like prolog, and is designed for soft-real-time applications (Erisson designed it for their phone switches). It has single assignment variables and uses recursion quite heavily. It is also pretty efficient, especially in highly concurrent and distributed situations.

I really do agree with you that most of the "purity of functional languages" talk tends to be overly acedemic and not very pragmatic from a "programmer in the trenches point of view". However, i do find it depressing to think that the style of programming we are all doing today is the best anyone can come up with. But that discussion is for another thread.

-stvn

In reply to Re^5: Functional Perl 6/PUGS by stvn
in thread Functional Perl 6/PUGS by stvn

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