Questions tagged [functional-programming]
For questions regarding functional programing concepts like immutability, closures, pure functions, and monads or regarding functional languages which enforce some or all of these constraints.
26 questions
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Why are there different typeclass hierarchies?
What's the history and reasoning behind the differences in the typeclass hierarchies in various functional programming language standard libraries? For instance, why does ...
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What problems do applicative functors solve, as an abstraction relative to monads and arrows?
TL;DR
This site is of course particularly interested in the language designer's and implementor's perspective so, following What is an arrow and what powers would it give as a first class concept in a ...
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Are there any programming languages that operate solely via side-effects?
Out of curiosity I checked how Google AI would respond to a similar question. The bot seemed clever enough to understand the question, but responded that functions in this case would have no return ...
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What challenges might still prevent compiler or JIT optimizations of common FP operations like map, filter, and reduce?
(While I'm referring to JS in my example, I don't intend to be constrained to JS: so any comments/answers concerning FP-style APIs for working with collections for any language are welcome and ...
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Does a Rust implementation of the Monkey programming language require a garbage collector?
Awhile back I wrote a Rust implementation of the Monkey programming language by Thorsten Ball (https://monkeylang.org/). When I got done with it I was a bit surprised that I never used an Arc/Rc ...
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2
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Can total (primitive) corecursion be implemented?
I'm trying to understand how to implement corecursion in a total functional context. I've already implemented recursion using standard techniques (for loops) but I ...
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When do functional programming languages need advanced garbage collection?
While thinking about garbage collection, I realized a simple fact that a garbage collector that is more than reference counting is needed because there are circular references, but there are ...
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2
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What is the mathematical abstraction of bitflags for use in a purely functional language?
A lot of C APIs like to have something called bit flags to signal the functions configuration options like Vulkan, OpenCL, SQLite and much more, it a typical pattern to it.
This common pattern of ...
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Is there a generic way to refer to the current function in recursion?
In writing recursive functions (functional style), I often need to refer to the current function (depending on the context).
e.g.
f 0 = 0
f (S n) = f n + 2
Are ...
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3
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How to implement + in a language where functions accept only one argument? [closed]
While reading about currying, I found the argument that it is beneficial in languages, which have only functions accepting only one argument.
I am wondering how to implement a 2-ary function like the ...
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Are there Haskell-like languages where equations allow for arbitrary left-hand sides?
In Haskell, you can define algorithms by equations that pattern-match on left-hand side constructors. For example:
...
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How does the map function work in stack-based languages?
In many languages, the map function takes a function and a list, and applies the function to each element of the list, returning a new list of the results. Some ...
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How do languages chain higher-order functions while still keeping performance?
How do different programming languages deal with the chaining of higher-order functions (ex. [1,2,3].foldl((a, b) => a+b, 0), ...
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3
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Towards a better default listlike datastructure for functional languages
In most functional languages I know of, linked lists are the default datastructure of choice for many operations. The benefits are clear - they're clearly encoded with ADTs, and can be utilised easily ...
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3
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How can I design a Functor trait to handle trait?
In programming languages like Rust, variables of different types that implement the same trait can have different sizes, i.e., the number of bytes used in the memory representation of the type. For ...
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