In the PL community, functional definitely means no side-effects. You can indeed write purely-functional C, though from recent experience I can safely say it's a gigantic pain. SML and o'caml and common lisp and haskell and so on are "mostly" functional languages since you have to go out of your way to be able to rewrite something. Refusing all side effects isn't really practical.
I've seen code that was just a lambda soup. It helped make me despise Ruby, although it wasn't the language's fault (plenty enough other things were). Most code I run into sees a function that takes a closure as basically a loop, which is perfectly readable.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-09-12 03:24 pm (UTC)I've seen code that was just a lambda soup. It helped make me despise Ruby, although it wasn't the language's fault (plenty enough other things were). Most code I run into sees a function that takes a closure as basically a loop, which is perfectly readable.