Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

5.15 Thematic Takeaways

• Functional programming unites beauty with utility.

• The λ-calculus, and the three grammar rules that constitute it, are sufficiently powerful. (Notice that we did not discuss much syntax in this chapter.)

• An important theme in a course on data structures and algorithms is that data structures and algorithms are natural reflections of each other. Therefore, “when defining a program based on structural induction, the structure of the program should be patterned after the structure of the data” (Friedman, Wand, and Haynes 2001, p. 12).

• Powerful programming abstractions can be constructed in a few lines of Scheme code.

• Recursion can be built into any programming language with support for first-class anonymous functions.