Re: [Haskell-cafe] Wikipedia on first-class object

Am Freitag, 28. Dezember 2007 08:12 schrieb Cristian Baboi:

On Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:35:54 +0200, Jonathan Cast

wrote:

...

Only on Von Neuman machines. Haskell implementations are not required to run on Von Neuman machines. That's why the language is called functional. (Imperative languages, by contrast, are just abstractions of the underlying Von Neuman architecture, which is probably the source of your confusion).

Can you tell me what is it that make a language imperative ?

When I learned about formal grammars and languages, there was no discussion about this.

This is because a formal language (set of words) only consideres the syntactic aspect and formal grammars are only about describing formal languages. In contrast, imperative vs. declarative is about semantics. A language is imperative if programs written in this language say how something should be done instead of what should be the outcome. This description is rather informal, of course. Best wishes, Wolfgang