Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
I say Excel is a functional language. If there needs to be the quoted distinction, fine: Excel the language is a functional language, and Excel the application is an interpreter of said language.
Excel has functions, but does it treat functions as it treats other data? I don't think so, and that makes it non-functional (dys-functional?). As for VB... that may be functional, in the same sense as XSLT is: if you step back and squint, it almost looks vaguely like a functional language.
(Does the opposition self-consistently distinguish Perl the language from perl.exe the interpreter?)
"Only perl can parse Perl." (Yes, they do.) -Udo -- "Science is like sex - sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that's not what we are doing it for." -- Richard Feynman