Functional programming

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. It is more heavily used in academia than in industry. The strength of a functional paradigm is the removal of side-effects during computation. This has uses

Related Topics:
Programming paradigm - Computation - Mathematical functions

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in both program verification, for checking the correctness of programs, and in program optimisation. One particular use in program optimisation is

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to transform programs for parallel programming.

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Functional programming emphasizes the definition of functions, rather than the implementation of state machines. This is in contrast to procedural or imperative programming where programming emphasizes the sequencing of commands in execution. The values in these languages are formed by using assignments to transform the state of the program. A functional program

Related Topics:
State machines - Procedural - Imperative programming - Program

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is immutable: rather than modify state to produce values, it constructs state from older pieces of state in the program.

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