Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!news.mixmin.net!news.musoftware.de!wum.musoftware.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Something is rotten in Denmark... Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:40:53 +1200 Lines: 22 Message-ID: <94td8nFdpkU1@mid.individual.net> References: <2_AFp.30000$241.24052@newsfe07.iad> <4de71c42$0$29983$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <87zkm0qyze.fsf@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> <94qlhsFkriU1@mid.individual.net> <87vcwnqk2j.fsf@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net 3PrpQDusLu1jSIuRHGbo+AdYSuXyelTgyw8qm766CHsbpSbwLx Cancel-Lock: sha1:sVt7wswFhle7AHmQYSE0k8sK14Y= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <87vcwnqk2j.fsf@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.python:6989 Alain Ketterlin wrote: > You must be kidding. Like many others, you seem to think that Scheme is > a typical functional language, which it is not. I never said that Scheme is a functional language -- I'd be the first to acknowledge that it's not. I do know what real functional languages are like. However, Scheme is more relevant to this discussion than Haskell, precisely because it's *not* purely functional -- it does allow existing bindings to be changed. Yet its lambdas are late-binding, and nobody seems to get tripped up by that they way they do in Python. Why not? It's because Scheme encourages a style of programming which favours creation of new bindings rather than changing existing ones, so most of the time the bindings captured by a lambda don't change later. -- Greg