Re: which paradigms does bash support

[Pádraig Brady]

On 14/03/18 00:22, Pierre Gaston wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 6:05 PM, Pádraig Brady <P@draigbrady.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 26/01/15 13:43, Greg Wooledge wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 08:11:41PM -0800, garegin16@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> As a programming language which paradigms does bash support.
>> Declarative, procedural, imperative?
>>>
>>> This belongs on help-bash@gnu.org so I'm Cc'ing that address.
>>>
>>> Shell scripts are procedural.
>>
>> It should be noted that shell programming is closely related to functional
>> programming.
>> I.E. functional programming maintains no external state and provides
>> data flow synchronisation in the language.  This maps closely to the
>> UNIX filter idea; data flows in and out, with no side affects to the
>> system.
>>
>> By trying to use filters and pipes instead of procedural shell statements,
>> you get the advantage of using compiled code, and implicit multicore
>> support etc.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Pádraig.
>>
> 
> Though I understand what you say and maybe you can see pipes as something
> functional(ish),
> I believe this is a misleading statement as imo shell scripting is not even
> close to be functional in any kind of way.


Well my point was, filters and pipes are similar to functional programming.
IMHO shell scripts are generally better when using these concepts when possible,
rather than using procedural shell statements.

See also http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html

cheers,
Pádraig