Imperative-style Haskell just doesn't 'flow' like a well-designed imperative language, e.g. But if you take that philosophy far enough (using a rich set of combinators to express yourself clearly), then you arrive at functional programming again. It makes a whole lot of sense from a functional perspective, but imperative languages tend to sweep most of these details under the rug to make them easier to use.Īdmittedly, perhaps if we used a different while-style combinator it would be cleaner. (x:xs) ) to operate on the result of an inline computation.

Here is an example imperative-style computation using the above while loop, which finds the last element of a linked list: lastElt :: -> IO a I find Haskell pretty verbose and awkward to use in an imperative style. It's really all about Haskell's abstraction abilities that makes it a very fine imperative language. Combined with the abstraction ability, you can write functions which act on 'any computation that produces a stream', etc. It can't print to the console or establish network connections, etc.

This can be an 'imperative' function, but we know that it can only do two things: For example, if we have a function: foo :: (MonadWriter m) => m Int Python and C#.īut Haskell also has the (highly unique) ability to characterize allowed side-effects, using the Monad classes. This can be done in imperative languages that have closures eg. This level of abstraction is difficult for many imperative languages. For example, Haskell has no built-in imperative while loop, but we can just write it and now it does: while :: (Monad m) => m Bool -> m () -> m () Haskell has an amazing ability to abstract, and that includes abstraction over imperative ideas.

Imperative programming language list