> The world is full of special cases, of corner cases, of exceptions, of holes, of particular conditions, of differences for first or last element, and other ir

> The world is full of special cases, of corner cases, of exceptions, of holes, of particular conditions, of differences for first or last element, and other irregularities; it is also full of sequential events. True > Applying a function to a starting set, to produce a resulting set or value is very lean with clean nice mathematical objects and relations True > but not with many real-world problems. Debatable, but in any case a non-sequitur. Are you sure you're talking about functional languages as they're used in reality? I once wrote a translator between an absurdly messy XML schema called FpML (Financial products Markup Language) and a heterogeneous collection of custom data types with all sorts of "special cases, corner cases, exceptions, holes, etc.". I wrote it in Haskell. It was a perfect fit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FpML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FpML