Purely Functional Structured Programming

TL;DR

This paper introduces LINEAR SCOPE, a concept that integrates structured programming with purely functional programming, enabling easier adoption of functional benefits like parallelism without complex concepts.

Contribution

It proposes LINEAR SCOPE as a novel approach to combine structured programming with purely functional programming, simplifying the transition and understanding.

Findings

Enables mainstream programmers to adopt functional programming benefits.

Allows purely functional programmers to write more readable code.

Facilitates parallelism in functional programming.

Abstract

The idea of functional programming has played a big role in shaping today's landscape of mainstream programming languages. Another concept that dominates the current programming style is Dijkstra's structured programming. Both concepts have been successfully married, for example in the programming language Scala. This paper proposes how the same can be achieved for structured programming and PURELY functional programming via the notion of LINEAR SCOPE. One advantage of this proposal is that mainstream programmers can reap the benefits of purely functional programming like easily exploitable parallelism while using familiar structured programming syntax and without knowing concepts like monads. A second advantage is that professional purely functional programmers can often avoid hard to read functional code by using structured programming syntax that is often easier to parse mentally.