Introduction to Functional Programming using Gofer

ing out and studying those patterns of computation as useful objects in their own right leads to further insights into the nature of computation. The list operators studied later in these notes follow this approach. ffl Functional programs are usually an order of magnitude more concise than their imperative counterparts. Besides being shorter, they can be much more readable. The functional community like to cite studies that show the number of bugs per line is more or less constant, independent of the level of the language in use. Higher-level languages encode more concept per line, and therefore have relatively fewer bugs. ffl Functional programs are often more akin to formal specifications than their conventional counterparts. A good notation goes a long way towards solving the problem[47]. ffl Lazy evaluation permits a new approach to some algorithms. It is a simple but powerful idea that can remove the need for explicit backtracking, and can allow the programmer to manipulate in..