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Unison | A friendly, statically-typed, functional programming language from the future · Unison programming language (www.unison-lang.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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A friendly programming language from the future.

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

I'm currently learning functional languages and have only limited knowledge, but from what I've read now you are right. Throwing exceptions is pure, but catching them is impure.

In this case I guess the printLine function can throw an exception therefore the calling function must be declared with Exception?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I would even have said that both throwing and catching should be pure, just like returning an error value/handling should be pure, but the reason for the throw/returning error itself is impure. Like if you throw and ioerror it's only after doing the impure io call, and the rest of the error reporting/handling itself can be pure.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Pure functions should be referentially transparent; you should be able to replace them with whatever value they evaluate to without changing the semantics of your code.

    Throwing is referentially impure: what value do you get from calling x => throw new RuntimeException()?

    Instead, functional languages prefer to return a tagged union of the value or the error.

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