Functional Programming in C++

From: Greg Colvin (gcolvin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-11-17 13:45:08

I was just catching up on my reading and found an interesting paper in the
proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Functional Programming
which looks relevant, to the small extent I understand it, to the similar
work here on Boost.

I found the following on the Web for those might care to check it out:
 
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~yannis/fc++/

FC++ is a library for functional programming in C++. Functional 
programming is a programming paradigm in which functions are treated as 
regular values. Thus, we can have functions that take other functions as 
parameters. The former functions are called "higher-order" functions. A 
common feature of functions is that they can be polymorphic. "Polymorphic" 
means that the same function can be used with arguments of many types. 
FC++ is distinguished from other libraries (including the C++ Standard 
Library) by its support for rank-2 polymorphism: FC++ polymorphic higher-
order functions can take other polymorphic functions as arguments and 
return polymorphic functions as results. This is particularly useful 
(i.e., simplifies code) in C++ where type inference is limited and we 
often need to pass polymorphic functions around and determine their type 
later. 

With FC++ you can define your own higher-order polymorphic functions, but 
the library also contains a large amount of functionality that can be re-
used as-is in C++ programs. This includes infinite ("lazy") lists, useful 
higher-order functions (like map, compose, etc.), a reference-counting 
facility that can be used to replace C++ pointers, many common logical and 
arithmetic operators in a form that can be used with higher-order 
functions, and more.