Hal Fulton a ñÄrit :
> James Britt wrote:
> 
>>> There *are* good, useful definitions of what constitutes a functional
>>> languages, and Ruby does not match the criteria for most of them. 
>>> Probably the most fundamental of all criteria is that the language
>>> does not allow side-effects, such as assignment.
> 
> 
> We're OT now, but my ignorance of FP is such that I can't imagine
> a language without assignment.
> 

"without assignment" should in fact read "without re-binding". Binding a 
value to a symbol is perfectly legal even in Haskell, but once bound, 
it's for the lifetime of the symbol...