Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming

Re:Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming by buffyoda on Saturday July 16, 2016 @10:52PM (#12108832)

I'm a big fan of the philosophy that "Every literal in a program is a bug." :)

But I know what you're getting at! Personally, I'm a fan of programming with units and dimensions, and safely representing the distinction between absolute quantities and relative quantities.

That doesn't mean I'd want an infinite number of "float" values for all possible units and dimensions, however; just a powerful enough type system I can give myself some help at compile-time for properly threading sensical values through my programs.

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Re:Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming by eru on Sunday July 17, 2016 @02:12AM (#12109200)

> "Every literal in a program is a bug."

But we use plenty of literals in our programs all the time. Eg lambdas are function literals. (And definitions of named functions are just a special case folding binding and a lambda.)

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