"functional" programming in Ada

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

Alejandro R. Mosteo wrote:
> Pros: purely recursive functions are really fun to write. If/case 
> expressions, used sparingly, do help a lot in having constant 
> declarations in local scopes. I'm writing more code in declarative parts. 

Be careful or else you will be yearning to write in Ada the full-fledged meta-template programming abomination that C++ has become in the past decade and a half.  If the Ada community were to ever want to have functional programming within Ada (as opposed to, say, bolting Ada & Haskell or Ada & OCaml together better), especially compile-time functional programming in Ada, then it should be overtly well-designed to walk in the front door, not sneak in the backdoor as it did in C++ when they/Alexandrescu ‘discovered’ that C++'s templates/generics were (just barely) Turing complete with syntax-as-nearly-unreadable-subtext that is perhaps even more cryptic than infinite-length tapes in a Turing machine.