On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 13:48 -0800, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On 6 Jan 2008, at 1:31 PM, jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
Derek Elkins writes:
Jonathan Cast wrote:
I find the term `declarative' to be almost completely meaningless. I was originally thinking of having the final sentence: "There are no clear, accepted meanings for any of these terms."
Clear, no. Accepted, yes. Let Jonathan Cast repeat that statement to people who organise conferences on Declarative Programming, or those who assembled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/foldoc/90/29.htm (or http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?declarative+language)
To quote your last citation:
declarative language: Any relational language or functional language.
Yes, the term `declarative' means something in the sense that we can tell whether any given language is declarative or not, so I should have been more clear. To wit, I do not believe the term `declarative' has any single referent, even in the sense that the term `functional' has any single referent. I find the only similarity between Haskell and Prolog to be that neither is imperative.
Indeed, you've discovered it. The definition of "declarative" is often "not imperative." (Or vice versa, where, as I said earlier, these are primarily defined by example rather than some predicate.)