Re: The state of functional programming

[Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov expounded in
news:a3iznu9uq49d$.1m9cupr81yhut$.dlg@40tude.net: 

> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:20:48 +0000 (UTC), Warren wrote:
..
>> I think you missed my point - perhaps it wasn't expressed
>> clearly.
>> 
>> As I understand it, a FP tries to determine conclusions 
>> from a universe of facts, given some inputs. For smaller
>> problems this can be _exhaustively_ analyzed and results 
>> obtained.
> 
> And so does any declarative language. You declare some facts in
> whatever form (as relations, as connections of blocks etc, for that
> matter, as types in a strongly typed languages like Ada). The system
> infers from them some executable code.

No, there is a big difference here.

In a non-FP language (Ada), you can solve _any_ problem so long
as you code it (you are coding the "how").  IOW, you have
solved the problem and specified it in code.

In FP, you define the "problem" (instead) and require from 
it a solution. But FP cannot always solve that "problem".

A huge difference, that.

Warren