Re: Naming convention to identify functions with side effects

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.tsoh.plus-bug.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

(see below) wrote:
> On 11/10/2008 12:32, in article
> d032eee0-fbaf-43f4-a18d-9cdf9aeee7d3@b38g2000prf.googlegroups.com, "Marco"
> <prenom_nomus@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Oct 4, 6:05 am, "(see below)" <yaldni...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On 04/10/2008 13:30, in article
>>> d49286ef-faa1-4b1b-8e23-0ed80c015...@p10g2000prf.googlegroups.com, "Marco"
>>>
>>> <prenom_no...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> On Oct 3, 5:28 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Side-effects are bad in any subprograms, be them functions or procedures.
>>>>   Technically "side-effects" are being used whenever you change an
>>>> internal state in a module, which is not always undesired.
>>> These are not "side-effects", they are just effects.
>>> The whole point of using computers is to cause changes of state.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_effect_(computer_science)
>>
>>  the functional programming folks would disagree with your "whole point"

(I'm probably dense, how is this an inevitable conclusion
to be drawn from the article?)

> I had a very distinguished group of them as colleagues for nearly 15 years,
> so I am only too aware of their profound misunderstanding of what computers
> are actually for.

Maybe Simon Peyton Jones has finally found a way to
make real computers visible to scientists with a preference
for world-excluding static functions. In
 "Tackling the Awkward Squad" (2005) he introduces Haskell
as "the world's finest imperative programming language"
using monads), drawing attention to I/O ("I/O is the raison d'�tre
of every program. ---a program that had no observable effect
whatsoever (no input, no output) would not be very useful."),
error detection and recovery, concurrency, and interfacing to
components of the OS or written in other languages.

Maybe computer operations need declarative paint and a
mathematical superstructure more abstract than that of
IF and GOTO in order to be on a CS teacher's radar?