Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.glorb.com!peer01.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED!nerds-end From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: OOP vs imperative, was Hello v1.0.3 distributed programming language available (alpha) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 13:40:01 GMT Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien Lines: 34 Sender: news@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <14-09-017@comp.compilers> References: <14-09-016@comp.compilers> NNTP-Posting-Host: news.iecc.com X-Trace: miucha.iecc.com 1411309093 58483 2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970 (21 Sep 2014 14:18:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@iecc.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 14:18:13 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: OOP, design, history Posted-Date: 21 Sep 2014 10:18:13 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com X-Received-Bytes: 2534 X-Received-Body-CRC: 1672017722 Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:1383 "Nils M Holm" writes: >Anton Ertl wrote: >> Smalltalk is an imperative language; e.g., it contains assignment and >> its objects contain changeable state. What makes you think that >> Smalltalk is functional? > >While I would agree that Smalltalk is not intended to be a functional >language, I think the argument of assignment and mutable state is not >valid. Why not? It's how you know whether a language is imperative or declarative. >In "The Definition of Standard ML", Milner, et al describe ML as a >functional language "in the sense that the full power of mathematical >functions is present". IMO, this property is sufficient to classify a >language as "functional". Even SML does have mutable state (references) >and assignment, BTW. So SML is an imperative language and a functional language then. These days one tends to avoid that, because with mutable state, you don't get referential transparency, and without referential transparency, you miss out on some benefits of functional languages; but in earlier times people did not know how to live without mutable state, so they had mutable state in functional languages. Quite a lot in Lisp, less in ML, nothing in Haskell (or at least the imperative stuff is encapsulated in a way that avoids destroying referential transparency for the functional part). - anton -- M. Anton Ertl anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/