On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 01:08:31PM +0100, Chris Dornan wrote:
For those who haven’t seen it Uday Reddy has a comprehensive answer to a request to explain referential transparency on Stack Overflow.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210835/what-is-referential-transparency/9 859966#9859966
For good measure he finishes with a rather scathing assessment of functional programmers’ claim to ownership of RT:
Functional programmers don't know much of this research. Their ideas on referential transparency are to be taken with a large grain of salt.
Marvellous! 'Tis rare to find such a robust assessment combined with understanding (and it certainly makes me think a bit).
So a language is referentially transparent if replacing a sub-term with another with the same denotation doesn't change the overall meaning? But then isn't any language RT with a sufficiently cunning denotational semantics? Or even a dumb one that gives each term a distinct denotation.