F# for Quantitative Finance

Explaining functions

It's now time to look at functions, the most basic and powerful building block in F#, and any other functional programming language for that matter. Functional programming languages use functions as first class constructs, in contrast to object-oriented programming, where objects and data are first class constructs. This means that in functional programming, functions will produce data based on the input and not based on state. In object-oriented programming, the state is encapsulated into objects and passed around. Functions are declared in the same way as variables were declared previously in the preceding snippets, with let bindings. Have a look at the following code snippet:

let sum (x,y) =
	x + y
> sum (7, 7)

If you try ...