Re: Declarative constraints in practical terms

From: vc <boston103_at_hotmail.com>
Date: 28 Feb 2006 20:40:33 -0800
Message-ID: <1141188033.939357.306860_at_z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>


ralphbecket_at_gmail.com wrote:
[...]

> At the risk of making a weak argument, a declarative program is a
> mathematical statement, and mathematics is the most successful
> means of modelling the world yet invented! On the other hand, there
> is no useful mathematical intepretation of an imperative program.

It's a fascinating statement in the light of more than 40 years of denotational semantics history for imperative languages. On the other hand, all the 'pure' languages can have operational semantics (Mercury/Prolog ->WAM).

>
> > All declarative languages have these features that are not found in
> > imperative languages:
> >
> > Would the list completing this sentence be Ralph's list above?
>
> In a nutshell, if your language is just a special syntax for (some)
> mathematics, then it's declarative. In mathematics there are no
> side effects and the order in which you evaluate things doesn't
> matter. (Order of evaluation is something compilers should worry
> about; programmers should worry about writing programs that
> work and meet the spec.)
>
> -- Ralph
Received on Wed Mar 01 2006 - 05:40:33 CET

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