Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of functional languages in software development. The notion of a broad-spectrum language with a functional basis involves using different types of function, and expression at the different stages of development. In the early stages of development, functions, and expressions are used to model real-world entities, and behaviors, and in the later stages of development, functions are used to implement algorithms, and data structures. Functions have a well-defined computational interpretation, that is, in terms of the rewriting of expressions illustrated in the previous section. This interpretation is not dependent upon an implicit machine state, in the way that the meaning of conventional programs is dependent upon current values of stored variables. All the information necessary to interpret a functional representation is contained in the definitions of the functions involved. This is often referred to as referential transparency. A related property of functional languages is that they do not generally require decisions to be made about the scheduling of operations, or about the actual storage of data.
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