From: joswig@... (Rainer Joswig) Date: 2004-07-14T21:57:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Functional Ruby (Re: Why I don't use Ruby.) "Sean O'Dell" wrote in message news:<200407131542.02202.sean@celsoft.com>... > On Tuesday 13 July 2004 15:22, Florian Gross wrote: > > Sean O'Dell wrote: > > > > > > I know, but I was trying to illustrate how some people seem to get > > > the rule against assignment operators confused with simple > > > assignment. You can assign values to variables in a functional > > > language, you just have to do it through a function call; the > > > assignment is permitted, however. We're in agreement. > > > > I'm not sure we're that rule is coming from -- do you remember any > > sources for this or could you try to explain why it exists for yourself? > > I just found a great primer on FP, and I think I have either forgotten a lot > of it from my LISP days, or LISP never had these FP features I'm reading > about. This is really a very authoritative, clear and concise explanation: > > http://www.cs.nyu.edu/goldberg/pubs/gold96.pdf > > Sean O'Dell how should the PROD function mentioned in that authoritative ;-) explanation work? Looks not very convincing to me. M needs to be incremented in the recursive call - otherwise it would be running for a very LOOOOONG time. Obviously that example code has never been checked.