Haskell vs Backus

None of these functional programmers, including the Haskell people, seem to have understood Backus's paper. They don't even understand the words in front of them. They think ``no variables'' means no assignment. He very clearly meant no variables as in no variable definitions, only function definitions.

Haskell would not qualify as functional programming by Backus's definition because it has variable definitions. That's the first clue that something is wrong. Either Backus's idea is such a failure that even ``pure functional programmers'' don't want to use it or it's some kind of scam. Backus founded a religion but his own followers don't follow its teachings.

>>10
No, a variable is just a way of identifying a value that is stored somewhere. Even in >>7's example, which technically uses "anonymous" variables, the arguments still have an identity insofar as being a list passed to the function.

``A function with no arguments" is essentially the same thing as a constant, not a variable. The maximum number of unique values of a function is equal to the maximum possible unique combinations of arguments, and supposing (just for this example) that all arguments are boolean, a unary function has 2 possible values, a binary function has 4 possible values, and a ternary function has 8. Regardless of the range of argument types, a nullary function only has one possible value, because the ONLY possible combination of arguments is "no arguments". Which means, if a nullary function actually is a function, then it just stores a single value, making it equivalent to a constant.

There is no meaningful difference between

function pi() { return 3.14; }

and

const pi = 3.14;