See archived version with outlinks here. As of May 26, 2023, there is no standard modeling language for pure functional programming, but there are alternatives: 1. UML UML has traditionally been associated with object-oriented programming (OOP), mostly because of its historical roots1, 2, but one can certainly attempt to use it for different programming paradigms … Read more
Another way of thinking about this question might be: why did C++, rather than Objective-C, become the “Object-Oriented C”? I learned C++ in 1991, and remember that C++ seemed like the hot thing while Objective-C was this weird little language that no-one (other than NeXT) wanted to use. I’ve been trying to remember why, and … Read more
Sure, the question is whether the macro is convenient to use and how powerful they are. Let’s first look how Lisp is slightly different. Lisp syntax is based on data, not text Lisp has a two-stage syntax. A) first there is the data syntax for s-expressions examples: (mary called tim to tell him the price … Read more
Because you are not required to capture the return value of a method in Java, in which case the compiler can not decide which overload to use. E.g. boolean doSomething() { … } int doSomething() { … } doSomething(); // which one to call???
The premises behind the question are a bit dodgy. It is not true that interpreted languages are mostly ducktyped. It is not true that compiled languages mostly have strong typing. The type system is a property of a language. Compiled versus interpreted is a property of an implementation. Examples: The programming language Scheme is dynamically … Read more
I don’t think there is black and white here – there is a whole spectrum between dynamic and static. Let’s take two extreme examples for each side of the spectrum, and see where that takes us. Haskell is an extreme in the static direction. It has a powerful type system that is checked at compile … Read more
I believe Lisp fits that description. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp
Well, the existence of SICP suggests that functional languages can be used as introductory material. Scheme is perhaps more approachable than Haskell, however. Haskell seems to have a reputation for being “difficult” to learn, but people tend to forget that classic imperative programming is difficult to learn as well. Many people struggle at first with … Read more
Neither approach has a clear advantage over the other – if one approach was always better, chances are that we’d start using it everywhere! Generally speaking, compilers offer the following advantages: Because they can see all the code up-front, they can perform a number of analyses and optimizations when generating code that makes the final … Read more
May be a specific example will help. Let us take the host language as Python and the guest language as C. This means that Python will be calling C functions. The first option is to write the C library in a particular way. In the case of Python the standard way would be to have … Read more