Foundations of F#

CHAPTER 3Functional Programming

You saw in Chapter 1 that pure functional programming treats functions as values, relies on recursion for looping, and does not allow changes to state. In this chapter, you'll survey the major language constructs of F# that support the functional programming paradigm.

Identifiers

Identifiers are the way you give names to values in F# so you can refer to them later in a program. You define an identifier using the keyword let followed by the name of the identifier, an equals sign, and an expression that specifies the value to which the identifier refers. An expression is any piece of code that represents a computation that will return a value. The following expression shows a value being assigned to an identifier: ...