A number of concepts and paradigms are specific to functional programming, and generally foreign to imperative programming (including object-oriented programming). However, programming languages are often hybrids of several programming paradigms, so programmers using "mostly imperative" languages may have utilized some of these concepts.[40]
First-class and higher-order functions[edit]
Higher-order functions are functions that can either take other functions as arguments or return them as results. In calculus, an example of a higher-order function is the differential operator d/dx
Higher-order functions are closely related to first-class functions in that higher-order functions and first-class functions both allow functions as arguments and results of other functions. The distinction between the two is subtle: "higher-order" describes a mathematical concept of functions that operate on other functions, while "first-class" is a computer science term that describes programming language entities that have no restriction on their use (thus first-class functions can appear anywhere in the program that other first-class entities like numbers can, including as arguments to other functions and as their return values).
Higher-order functions enable partial application or currying, a technique that applies a function to its arguments one at a time, with each application returning a new function that accepts the next argument. This lets a programmer succinctly express, for example, the successor function as the addition operator partially applied to the natural number one.
Pure functions[edit]
Pure functions (or expressions) have no side effects (memory or I/O). This means that pure functions have several useful properties, many of which can be used to optimize the code:
- If the result of a pure expression is not used, it can be removed without affecting other expressions.
- If a pure function is called with arguments that cause no side-effects, the result is constant with respect to that argument list (sometimes called referential transparency), i.e., if calling the pure function again with the same arguments returns the same result. (This can enable caching optimizations such as memoization.)
- If there is no data dependency between two pure expressions, their order can be reversed, or they can be performed in parallel and they cannot interfere with one another (in other terms, the evaluation of any pure expression is thread-safe).
- If the entire language does not allow side-effects, then any evaluation strategy can be used; this gives the compiler freedom to reorder or combine the evaluation of expressions in a program (for example, using deforestation).
While most compilers for imperative programming languages detect pure functions and perform common-subexpression elimination for pure function calls, they cannot always do this for pre-compiled libraries, which generally do not expose this information, thus preventing optimizations that involve those external functions. Some compilers, such as gcc, add extra keywords for a programmer to explicitly mark external functions as pure, to enable such optimizations. Fortran 95 also lets functions be designated pure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming
