Which means you are conceiving a strawman to mock.

The point is “no side effects other than IO” is a useful observation to make about how a language feels to use and the kinds of programs it encourages one to write.

Whether V is a good example of such a language I’ve no idea.

Exactly, that was the idea. The wording was already changed a couple of weeks ago to more clear on the home page. Will update the docs as well.