Dear all,<div><br></div><div>there is a question I have been thinking about a bit. In short, we could simply formulate it like this:</div><div><br></div><div>Are there any problems which <i>cannot </i>be solved a side effect-free language (such as Haskell)? In other words, are there problems that would explicitly demand semantics that can only be provided by a language allowing direct modification of external state variables, such as Java and C++?</div>
<div><br></div><div>If not, are there problems which are simply <i>infeasible </i>to solve with a side effect-free language?</div><div><br></div><div>I realize this question is very broad, and I am not expecting an exact answer by any means. I am asking since I am curious about the relation between functional and imperative/procedural languages in general. I primarily come from a Java background, but I can program Haskell and Erlang, and have recently started exploring Scala, so this would be interesting to know.<br clear="all">
<div><br></div>-- <br>Best,<div><br></div><div>Christopher Svanefalk</div><div><br></div><div>Student,</div><div>Department of Computer Science and Engineering</div><div>University of Gothenburg / Chalmers University of Technology</div>
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