Subject: RE: Variables and constants From: Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@xxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:01:44 -0000 |
> This is more of a philosophical question. Since I haven't worked with > functional programming languages before, can anyone explain to me the > rationale for not having true variables a'la procedural programming > languages (i.e. you can re-assign the value of an existing variable)? I wasn't involved in the decision, but I've read some of the early working papers, and as far as I can see the principal rationale was that a language without side-effects would be capable of incremental rendering, e.g. starting to display the output before all the input has arrived. I suspect that in those early days most people expected the language to have a lot less computational power than it ended up with. The desire to make it declarative and side-effect free was generally coupled with a (contradictory) requirement to enable it to call external functions or scripts. There is also an argument that a language without side-effects is capable of a higher degree of optimisation, is less error prone, and so on. The one argument I haven't seen in anything I've read is any discussion of ease of use, ease of learning, or (sacrilege) "why not ask the users what they want?" Mike Kay XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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