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Re:Why I Prefer Functional Programming by amw-zero on Saturday October 31, 2020 @10:09PM (#24956745)
Computation cannot be reduced to simply functions, that’s why we need something like the lambda calculus to express computation. There are functions within the calculus, but to say that “computation is a function” is not correct.
Re:Why I Prefer Functional Programming by pcstl on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @01:04PM (#24982172)
Actually, computation, in the classic sense used by Turing, Church, and other pioneers, refers to evaluating the value of (mathematical) functions. The word computation first appears in the earliest papers of the field which would later become computer science referring to "computable functions", which refers to functions which can be evaluated by a mechanical process. Hence saying "not everything computers do is computation".