David Brown a écrit :
> 
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 02:05:16PM +0200, Siegfried Gonzi wrote:
> 
> > Lisp dialects, they have taken a purely functional approach. Today's
> > Lisp dialects, foremostly Common Lisp, don't see any problems in making
> > use of side effects, using iteration instead of recursion, using
> > object-oriented abstraction if useful for the problem at hand, and so
> > on. Just use the best abstraction for your current problem.
> 
> So having feature in addition to functional features disqualifies a
> language from being labelled.  All of the accusations given certainly
> apply to Ocaml as well.  Having objects and side-effects doesn't seem to
> stop me from doing functional programming.
> 
> To me, the core feature of functional programming are first class
> closures.  Everything else just makes it more convenient.

 So Smalltalk is a functional language ;-)
 Maybe tail call optimisation has to be considered as a necessary
feature for a langage to qualify ?
 
> 
> Why someone would think using the best abstraction for your current
> problem is a bad thing is beyond me.  I think that is one of the
> strengths of Ocaml, is that it can accomodate this so well.

 Agreed.

 Cheers,
 Sébastien

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