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> In procedural languages you say *how* to do things. In
> functional languages you say *what* you want. For instance,
> languages like Visual Basic are procedural language because
> you specify to the system a sequence of actions to perform,
> something like "display", "calculate", "store", "recall". In
> the case of functional language, you do not have to say
> "display" you specify what you want as final result. For
> instance by specifying a template. There are also other more
> subtle elements to consider but these two elements catch the
> essential spirit of procedural vs. functional or the
> opposition of "how" vs. "what". In one case you tell the
> system what kind of action to perform, in the other case you
> specify what you want as final result.
>
> Off course, Visual basic is a strange beast since you
> visually specify the visual end result by placing components
> in a form. And this could be considered as specifying "what"
> we want in terms of visual layout [1]. So probably we would
> have to use a more precise definition for both concepts.
Sounds more like declarative versus procedural. C is procedural,
Prolog is declarative. XML-RPC is proceduralish, XSLT is
declarativish. Functional programming normally means programming
without assignments.
Bill de hÓra
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