Indeed, here's an interesting paper arguing this point: SSA is Functional Programming. Andrew W. Appel. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.ps htt

Indeed, here's an interesting paper arguing this point: SSA is Functional Programming. Andrew W. Appel. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.ps http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.ps What is omitted there however is a discussion of pointer parameters and call-by-reference; probably these cannot be treated in the same way as local variables since they point to a fixed address passed in by the caller, so at that point SSA can't be functional, unless I'm missing something.