Re: regex and "Functional Programming"

[FoxtrotUniform]

See, for instance About Haskell. Personally, I think of "functional programming" as a style of programming that doesn't do much in the way of assignment or iteration and treats functions as first-class values: for instance, functions can take functions as parameters and return other functions. An example might be Specializing Functions with Currying. Most functional languages are really good at list processing, Lisp being the canonical example.

[Zed_Lopez]

There's a whole lot of iterating going on in functional languages; it's just going to tend to look like perl map or foreach loops and not like a while or C-style for loop.

Generally, though, where applicable, one's more likely to choose a recursive algorithm than an iterative one, which is likely what you meant, but, well, yours in pedantry and all.

[FoxtrotUniform]

There's a whole lot of iterating going on in functional languages; it's just going to tend to look like perl map or foreach loops and not like a while or C-style for loop.

Heh. I can't speak for all functional languages, but the map function in Haskell is defined recursively in the Haskell Standard Prelude. So is iterate (which really means "repeat-compose"), as well as the folds. Hell, even the "iterative" sequenced monad operations are defined recursively. Mostly, this follows from the recursive definition of lists: a list is either an empty list, or a datum consed onto a list.

There's probably some iteration going on in even the most standards-compilant Haskell implementation, but as far as I can tell none of it happens at the language level. Feel free to correct me, though, if you find any in the Prelude; I don't know it as well as I ought.

Of course, the first example in my copy of ANSI Common Lisp isn't very "functional" at all:

(defun sum (n)
  (let ((s 0))
    (dotimes (i n s)
      (incf s i))))