6 ms·

Can you explain what you mean by this please?

kevindication 16y ago
He's likely arguing against any non-Functional Language. "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.
- bad_user 16y ago
  No, he's probably arguing in favor of expressions (i.e. stuff that returns values). Smalltalk has expressions everywhere, with control blocks being just closures passed to methods on objects ... a < b ifTrue: [^'A is less than B'] ifFalse: [^'A is greater or equal to B'] > "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance. Such a Lisp also has no users.
  - ekiru 16y ago
    And no implementations.
    - lmkg 16y ago
      Incorrect: ACL2, an industry-standard automated theorem-prover, is written in a side-effect-free variant of Common Lisp. It has both an implementation and users, including users outside of academia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2
      - moe 16y ago
        I guess both (no implementations, no users) were meant in relative terms, and in that light they describe reality pretty well. Hands up, who has heard of ACL2 before?
        rbanffy 16y ago
        I did. In fact, I am appalled so few people, apparently, heard of it.
        jrockway 16y ago
        Any programming language that can't be cut-n-pasted from fifty different websites to make my SQL-injection-rich AJAX social awesome NoSQL site just isn't worth knowing. Theorem proving -- you ain't gonna need it! What's next, you're going to tell me you write unit tests? Hahahahah.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        In theory, at least, I wouldn't need them for I proof the program is correct ;-)
        sigstoat 16y ago
        me. i've even used similar tools.
technomancy 16y ago
There's no reason why there should be two kinds of things code can be made up of. (statements vs expressions) In a well-designed language, everything that is a statement in Python would just be implemented as an expression that returns nil.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Interesting. I was under the impression that def x(a):... was only a pretty way to say x = function(a)... I have to agree print is a weird thing, but what other statements bother you so much?

He's likely arguing against any non-Functional Language. "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.

bad_user 16y ago
No, he's probably arguing in favor of expressions (i.e. stuff that returns values). Smalltalk has expressions everywhere, with control blocks being just closures passed to methods on objects ... a < b ifTrue: [^'A is less than B'] ifFalse: [^'A is greater or equal to B'] > "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance. Such a Lisp also has no users.
- ekiru 16y ago
  And no implementations.
  - lmkg 16y ago
    Incorrect: ACL2, an industry-standard automated theorem-prover, is written in a side-effect-free variant of Common Lisp. It has both an implementation and users, including users outside of academia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2
    - moe 16y ago
      I guess both (no implementations, no users) were meant in relative terms, and in that light they describe reality pretty well. Hands up, who has heard of ACL2 before?
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        I did. In fact, I am appalled so few people, apparently, heard of it.
        jrockway 16y ago
        Any programming language that can't be cut-n-pasted from fifty different websites to make my SQL-injection-rich AJAX social awesome NoSQL site just isn't worth knowing. Theorem proving -- you ain't gonna need it! What's next, you're going to tell me you write unit tests? Hahahahah.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        In theory, at least, I wouldn't need them for I proof the program is correct ;-)
      - sigstoat 16y ago
        me. i've even used similar tools.

technomancy 16y ago

There's no reason why there should be two kinds of things code can be made up of. (statements vs expressions) In a well-designed language, everything that is a statement in Python would just be implemented as an expression that returns nil.

rbanffy 16y ago
Interesting. I was under the impression that def x(a):... was only a pretty way to say x = function(a)... I have to agree print is a weird thing, but what other statements bother you so much?