As part of our introduction, we'll look at a classic example of functional programming. This is based on the paper Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes. The article appeared in a paper called Research Topics in Functional Programming, edited by D. Turner, published by Addison-Wesley in 1990.
Here's a link to the paper Research Topics in Functional Programming:
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf
This discussion of functional programming in general is profound. There are several examples given in the paper. We'll look at just one: the Newton-Raphson algorithm for locating the roots of a function. In this case, the function is the square root.
It's important ...
