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A comment on Programming languages and their relationship styles. Parent comment

Re:Programming languages and their relationship styles by Dunbar on Thursday February 17, 2011 @07:50PM (#2233656)
Any language that is only pure is about as useful as write-only memory.

Haskell was historically pure and had side effects added as a way to interact with the world. The language enforces (discounting unsafePerformIO) the separation of pure and impure code. That is sufficient to label any practical language pure.

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Re:Programming languages and their relationship styles by jmillikin on Thursday February 17, 2011 @08:52PM (#2233835)
> Any language that is only pure is about as useful as write-only memory.

That's actually not true -- you can write the core of a system in a pure language, then use that pure core as a library in larger applications. Pure languages like Coq and Agda are often not Turing-complete, so various sorts of verification and proofs can be applied more easily.

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