Of what use is 'lambda'???

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:

> One can certainly declare "procedures" in C that do not return anything
> (declare a function as returning void), so that's not true of C.

I thought void was added later as a concession to people who don't
like throwing away values?  Didn't C originally return a value from
every function?

> > Is the difference that the returned
> > value is always significant?  Or is there more?
> 
> It's that everything is done by returning values.  Functional languages
> don't employ side effects to get things done.

Oh...   I'm not sure if that's even possible, in the general
case...  I'll have to think about that, but while I can see
that you could do string processing that way, I'm not sure 
how you could do things like file I/O and user interaction
without functions having side effects.  

- jonadab