Comparison To Imperative Programming
Functional programming is very different from imperative programming. The most significant differences stem from the fact that functional programming avoids side effects, which are used in imperative programming to implement state and I/O. Pure functional programming disallows side effects completely and so provides referential transparency, which makes it easier to verify, optimize, and parallelize programs, and easier to write automated tools to perform those tasks.
Higher-order functions are rarely used in older imperative programming. Where a traditional imperative program might use a loop to traverse a list, a functional program would use a different technique. It would use a higher-order function that takes as arguments a function and a list. The higher-order function would then apply the given function to each element of the given list and then return a new list with the results.
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