Abstract

Functional programming is a good idea, but we haven’t got it quite right yet. What we have been doing up to now is weak (or partial) functional programming. What we should be doing is strong (or total) functional programming- in which all computations terminate. We propose an elementary discipline of strong functional programming. A key feature of the discipline is that we introduce a type distinction between data, which is known to be finite, and codata, which is (potentially) infinite. 1 What is Functional Programming? It is widely agreed that functional programming languages make excellent introductory teaching vehicles for the basic concepts of computing. The wide range of topics covered in this symposium is evidence for that. But what is functional programming? Well, it is programming with functions, that much seems clear. But this really is not specific enough. The methods of denotational semantics show us

Citations