Land of Lisp

Anatomy of a Program Written in the Functional Style

Now that we’ve discussed how functional programming is done, let’s write a simple program that follows this style. Since we want this program to be a typical example of most software, we should figure out what most software in the world actually does. So what do most programs in the world actually do? They keep track of widgets!

Here’s our entire example program, written in the functional style:

;the clean, functional part
 (defun add-widget (database widget)
 (cons widget database)) ;the dirty, nonfunctional ...