下列文字摘自The Definition of “Pure Function”：
A pure function is a function that depends only on its declared inputs and its internal algorithm to produce its output. It does not read any other values from “the outside world” — the world outside of the function’s scope — and it does not modify any values in the outside world.
下列文字摘自What is This “Lambda” You Speak Of?：
lambda means “anonymous function,” and calculus means “a formal system”
Therefore, the term lambda calculus refers to “a formal way to think about functions.”
That same Wikipedia link states this:
“Lambda calculus provides a theoretical framework for describing functions and their evaluation. Although it is a mathematical abstraction rather than a programming language, it forms the basis of almost all functional programming languages today.”
When I first started learning about functional programming, I found these terms to be a little intimidating, but as with most FP terms, they’re just uncommon words for talking about “functions and their evaluation.”
下列文字摘自What is “Functional Programming”?：
In this lesson, I defined functional programming like this:
Functional programming is a way of writing software applications using only pure functions and immutable values.
To support that, I also defined pure function like this:
The output of a pure function depends only on (a) its input parameters and (b) its internal algorithm.
A pure function has no side effects, meaning that it does not read anything from the outside world or write anything to the outside world.
As a result of those first two statements, if a pure function is called with an input parameter x an infinite number of times, it will always return the same result y.I noted that higher-order functions (HOFs) are a terrific FP language feature, and also stated that recursion is a by-product of the definition of FP.
I also briefly discussed some of the benefits of immutable values (and FP in general):
The best FP code is like algebra
Pure functions and immutable values are easier to reason about
Without much support (yet), I stated that immutable values make parallel/concurrent programming easier