1) Functional programming is a style of programming that emphasizes the evaluation of
expressions rather than the execution of commands. Erlang programming
language is described as a functional programming language. Erlang avoids the use of global
variables that can be used in common by multiple functions since changing such a variable in part
of a program may have unexpected effects in another part.
2) In an earlier definition from the ITU-TS, functional programming is "a method for structuring
programs mainly as sequences of possibly nested function procedure calls." A function procedure is
a relatively simple program that is called by other programs and derives and returns a value to the
program that called it.
This was last updated in June 1998
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