Page 3 - Why learn OCaml?

Like I said, I'm not an expert with regards to LINQ. I haven't spent all that much time with it as of yet but having equivalents to map, filter, reduce etc. doesn't to my mind make the language directly related to applicative programming .

I agree that yes adding things like higher-order programming would are wonderfully powerful, but I'll add: if done well.


Adding classes and templates to C can be seen as a good idea and was probably regarded as a step forward but the resulting language is terribly inconsistent.

If the developers of C# can add useful abstractions like this without producing a mess then I take my hat off to them .

Some of the best language designers to date have tried this and to the best of my knowledge it isn't going so well .

Mark.

Actually, something I ran into in my short days with .net indicates there are already anonymous functions, named delegates. They're typically used for events it would appear.

Morning LP,

We're not talking about .NET, we're talking about the adoption of paradigms into languages not designed for them and the results on the languages semantics as entropy increases.

.NET may well have these things (they're certainly available in F# and others).

I personally don't know if C# 2.0 supports these things; I know that version 1.0 didn't, but version 3.0 will.

Mark.

I'm talking about c# 2.0. I had to write some obscure event sub and had to use a delegate for it which appeared to be equivalent to a lambda. far messier though.

The closest equivalent to a delegate is a function pointer. Not quite a lambda.

A delegate is like a lambda? So far as I understand the delegation design pattern I can't see how you could come to that conclusion .

Maybe C# has some kind of twisted semantics for this, I'll find out over the next year.

Edit: even after researching a while I can't see it, delegates just aren't like anonymous functions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation_(programming)

Mark.

Wikipedia

C# 3.0 will have lambda expressions.

From the above link:
"Anonymous delegates providing closure functionality."

Doesn't sound like lambda to me...