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While its probably outside the scope of what you're asking, just off
the top of my head direction to look for proper functional programming
is good ole Wikipedia.  While not always correct, it tends to
accumulate a good amount of information and links to more focused
papers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

Too much information to possibly be conveyed in an email.  On a side
note, one of my goals of my PhD is to work towards introducing Lua as
an acceptable language in academia, for teaching any number of
concepts, functional programming being one of them.

But I somehow doubt that naming a book "The Little Luaer" would draw
much interest =)

On 9/21/06, Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@gmx.net> wrote:

Rici Lake wrote:
> But mine is still 25% faster, and can be improved even more by memoising:
>
> rlake@freeb:~$ time lua511 -l 'Memoise' -e 'local rep =
> Memoise(function(n) return ("%d"):rep(n) end); for i = 1, 1e5 do local t
> = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}; local a = rep[#t]:format(unpack(t)) end'

It was explained in this very list a long time ago, but I can't memorize
what memoise is... :-)

That leads me to a slightly off-topic field -- but of interest for most
programmers, I think.

I am a procedural programmer by experience (lot of Basic, C, assembly
language...) and habits.
I trained myself on OO design, concepts that were hard to assimilate
until I read OReilly's Head On Java, which explains clearly this stuff.

I am starting to get used to think OO, although not necessarily
convinced that it is the ultimate methodology.
I discovered in this list functional programming, elsewhere other
philosophies/methodologies like Xtreme programming (I feel I am mixing
up stuff here :-) ).

One question is: is there a good tutorial on functional programming,
ideally not relying too much on a given language. I don't have time to
re-learn Lisp or to study Scheme.

That said, a colleague lent me a copy of Head First Patterns. I have
base knowledge of (GoF) patterns, but again, it is not obvious to
assimilate them fully (no Borg here).

This brings me back to Lua. Do you think (some of) these patterns can
apply to this language? I mean, in its "purest" form, ie. without OO
system built above it.

And are they usable in functional programming? Or do this methodology
(?) has patterns of its own?

Just curious, I learned so much from this list!

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
--  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --