Re: Return

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> MON KEY writes:
>
>  > Indeed, one often doesn't miss what one never knew wasn't there to
>  > be missed.
>  > GVM has no doubt leveraged this against future Python initiates.
>
> Not at all.  Python is intended to have functional programming
> features, but it's also intended to primarily be an imperative
> language, not a functional language.

If you take a look at Elisp programs, you'll notice that in practice it
is primarily used as an imperative language, not a functional language
(that is: the focus is on executing actions, not on constructing
values).  It doesn't really help that the fundamental data structure,
the list, is not an abstract data type but realised via a rather
low-level pointer to a statically allocated pair of user-accessible
values, cutting right through the idea of "functional programming" where
the output is a mathematic function/transformation of the input.

Lisp does not have separate syntaxes for imperative execution and
expressions (and things like the C dichotomy of if/else/?: are somewhat
ugly, especially considering that expressions count as statements if you
tack a semicolon on).  But particularly the Emacs code base is not all
that "functional".

-- 
David Kastrup