What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?

Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by lostcolony on Sunday August 15, 2021 @10:06PM (#28194292)

There are plenty of further restrictions (such as immutable languages that don't have loops, because loops require mutation, and so instead rely on recursion), or which eschew being concerned about control flow at all (such as puppet, SQL, Prolog, etc; any declarative language). Certainly, those languages aren't "undoing" structured programming.

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Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by masklinn on Monday August 16, 2021 @06:33AM (#28196626)

> such as immutable languages that don't have loops, because loops require mutation, and so instead rely on recursion

These two are not as intertwined as you make them. OCaml has mutation but not iteration.

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Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by int_19h on Monday August 16, 2021 @01:46PM (#28200786)

OCaml has while- and for-loops.

A better example might be Clojure, which has mutable variables (opt-in, like OCaml), but no traditional imperative loops - only recursion. However, even then, the syntax for its tail-recursive construct uses "loop" as a keyword.

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Re:What can be learned from studying long gone development p... by lostcolony on Monday August 16, 2021 @06:37PM (#28203833)

I said immutable -> !loops (p implies not q).

You're saying !immutable -/> loops (not p does not imply q)

It's a fair thing to mention, but you're not gainsaying anything I said; I never said anything about mutable languages that don't have loops. In fact, to the topic at hand, you would assume that to be the case, given that structured programming was intended to force loops on languages at the time (mostly mutable) that weren't using them (but instead were using gotos and the like)

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