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From: "Alejandro R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: "functional" programming in Ada
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2018 12:07:34 +0100
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Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:50896
Date: 2018-03-08T12:07:34+01:00
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On 08/03/18 01:45, Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Alejandro R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com> writes:
>> Recommendations for current functional languages? I know only of
>> Haskell (and only by name).

Wow, thank you everybody for the suggestions and explanations. That's a 
bunch of interesting possibilities.

In another life I was proficient in Lisp and Prolog, but now I'm doing 
Ada when not scripting... so there's something attractive in every choice.

I guess I'll wait for some outward influence to push me in an avoidable 
direction ;-)

Álex.

> 
> If you want to get a deep understanding of what FP is about as a
> programming language topic, I'd go with Haskell.  Be aware that Haskell
> does things the way mathematicians do things: very rigorous and precise
> at the actual logical level, but more casual and relaxed at the
> organizational level.
> 
> If you want something more like Ada, i.e. designed with attention to
> large-scale engineering features like separating spec from
> implementation, try Standard ML or the somewhat looser OCaml.  Either of
> these will be a less mathematically rigorous than Haskell at the value
> and expression level, but have a much more serious module system,
> something like Ada's.
> 
> Erlang and Elixir are more like Lisp or Python: they give a very quick
> and productive way to get simple things done, without much help for
> larger-scale rigor.  The interesting thing about them is their
> concurrency system implements what the programmer sees as isolated
> lightweight processes communicating by message passing.  That means you
> can split a big problem into smaller ones, so you can use low-tech
> methods on the small problems, letting the process isolation keep the
> subproblem solutions from interfering with each other too much.
> 
> FWIW you can think of Erlang as a concurrent Lisp system with a front
> end for a funky Prolog-like syntax.  Elixir is the same thing except the
> surface syntax is designed to look like Ruby.  There's also LFE
> (Lisp-flavored Erlang), same idea except it looks like actual Lisp.
>