-
Book Overview & Buying
-
Table Of Contents
Building Programming Language Interpreters
By :
The thing I hear the most when I introduce new engineers to functional programming is “But how does anything happen?”. This question illustrates how diametrically opposed functional programming is to the imperative paradigm in its relationship with the actual instructions executed in the hardware.
But that is precisely the point, to defer the rendering of instructions to a point where the problem is comprehended in a more complete way by the compiler. The goal is that the user should be able to specify the problem in terms of the relationships between functions.
This drastically changes how the user is meant to specify the problem to be solved. Perhaps the easiest way to explain this distinction is through the concept of a list of numbers and how we think about sorting them.
In an imperative paradigm, the natural way to think about a list of numbers is by imagining a region of memory with discrete sub-regions representing each of the...
Change the font size
Change margin width
Change background colour