Benjamin Kanagwa

The distinction between functional and procedural programs remains a confusing concept. In fact, many programmers use the terms function and procedure interchangeably. For this reason am going use the term pure function when i want to refer to a functional program.

A procedure in a program is a named block of code that can use several times by name to carry out a task. When a function or procedure is “called” to do a task. The task to be carried out may involve returning the output of the task when completed, modification of ‘something’ doings its task or both. When task involves modifying ’something’ outside its environment, we call that a side effect. A side effect will affect something outside the scope of the function, such as printing something to the screen, changing the value of a variable. There can be many side effects of a function before it’s done. For example, it might display values in the interpreter, or modify a file, or produce graphics before it completes. The built-in function print() in many languages creates a side effect by printing to the screen.

While side effects have their place in programming, the challenge is that side-effects, on completion of the task, the side-effect is NOT returned as an output that is sent directly to the caller. This means that if a procedure does not return value at the end of its task, we cannot assign it to a variable. For it only makes sense to have int bankBalance = bankSomeMoney(500), because what would be the value of bankBalance if the procedure bankSomeMoney(500) does not return a value? While this procedure might do so many things, side effects are different from returned values because they are not the output, and many side effects can occur in one procedure.

In programming, when something evaluates to a single value we call it an expression. if something does not evaluate to a value, we call it a statement. So the a call to a procedure that returns a single value is therefore an expression. Importantly, returned values can be used in future computations. Side effects cannot. Function calls are expressions, since they evaluate to a single value. That means we can nest them, the same way we can nest basic operations.

When a program relies on side-effects to produce the final result, then the order in which the side effects are produced and modified is very important, lest you might end-up with un-expected results. Thus every action must be carried out immediately.

Now, if we demand that our procedures do not make any side-effects, and must always return a single value, then we can eliminate many challenges and make other things possible. First, we can avoid state and mutable data. That is once a variable has be given a value it should note be changed (mutated), and state means the value of every variable used in the program.

So in computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the procedural programming style that emphasizes changes in state. Because in math, the functional works with only it inputs to produce an out.

Thus a pure a function in the sense of a functional language always evaluate to the same output given the same input. And since they evaluate to a value, in technical terms they are expressions. On the other hand, procedures don’t evaluate to a value, they might not return anything, just change internal state and therefore they are NOT expressions but statements.

Our bankSomeMoney(500) procedure is capable of return differing results depending on the current bank balance. So its output does not rely on only the inputs. You can modify it to bankSomeMoney(500, 2000) where 2000 is the current balance, in this case, for the same inputs it will return the same output.

Because functional programmers do not expect any thing to be changed “behind the curtains”, we can value the function to its value at the point when we need the value. Until that time the function itself is what is passed around. And when we have many functions ready for evaluation, we can decide on the most effective optimal evaluation strategy combining the functions.This property, evaluating a computation when its result is needed rather than sequentially where it’s called, is known as “laziness”.;values are computed when they are needed.

We are now ready to point out the key differences between procedural and functional languages. In summary, functional programming focuses on expressions while procedural programming focuses on statements. Expressions have values. A functional program is an expression whose value is a sequence of instructions for the computer to carry out.

Procedural:

• The output of a routine does not always have a direct correlation with the input.
• Everything is done in a specific order.
• Execution of a routine may have side effects.
• Tends to emphasize implementing solutions in a linear fashion.

Functional:

• Always returns the same output for a given input.
• Order of evaluation is usually undefined.
• Must be stateless. i.e. No operation can have side effects.
• Good fit for parallel execution – Each function can ignore the rest of the universe and focus on what it needs to do. When combined, functions are guaranteed to work the same as they would in isolation.
• May have the feature of Lazy Evaluation. – Which means a function is not executed until the value is needed. .

Are there pure functional and Procedural Programmings languages?

Man languages have both functional and procedural capabilities. So it is better to think in terms of a languages can be classified as more functional or more procedural based on how much they encourage the use of statements versus expressions.

You can still write in a functional style in a language which encourages the procedural paradigm and vice versa. It’s just harder and/or more awkward to write in a paradigm which isn’t encouraged by the language.

Lisp family and ML family,Haskell, Erlang, are on the side of “purely functional” while many early languages like assembly, Asm, lC, Pascal, Fortran and on the procedural side