LYCOS RETRIEVER
Functional Programming: Styles
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Functional Nets are a new way to think about programs and computation, born from a fusion of the essential ideas of functional programming and Petri nets. As in functional programming, the basic computation step in a functional net rewrites function applications to function bodies. As in Petri-Nets, a rewrite step can require the combined presence of several inputs (where in this case inputs are function applications). This fusion of ideas from two different areas results in a style of programming which is at the same time very simple and very expressive.
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Functional programming is an approach to programming in which programs are composed of functions that are evaluated rather than executed in sequence. These are not functions in the C sense but mathematical functions of the style
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One particular style of functional programming of particular merit is to make use of lazy evaluation. This allows you to define infinite structures (see the next section), devise particularly efficient solutions to certain kinds of problems, and come up with very elegant solutions to otherwise hard problems. The good news is that several parts of Groovy already make use of this style and they typically hide away the hard bits so you don't need to know what magic is happening on your behalf. Here's some examples:
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Anonymous delegates and the new static Array functions are very nifty features in .NET 2.0 that allow a compact functional style programming already today. The same ForEach, .. constructs are ... available for generic Lists as instance functions.
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In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.[1]
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