Perl Higher Order Functions

I've been chit-chatting with a friend who's learning Perl5, and has written some little apps for his own needs. While reviewing his code (not that I'm a programming guru, but I help with what I can), I talked about Higher order functions, and we ended writting some throwaway code to explain the idea.

To clarify the concepts, I wrote some trivial scheme functions-as-data munging in scheme, and translated them to Perl.

What surprised me, was the "wow!" comments about concepts that aren't perl unique features, but general higher order procedures. Certainly, Java and C++ are 'a bit' behind Perl, Ruby, or Lisp, but it's fun to remember how mind blowing are these concepts to newcomers. I discover mind-blowing concepts quite frequently too.

We had a good afternoon, reviewing code, Quines, concurrency, talking about GEB (The book I'd take to a desert island along with SICP)...

Here's part of the code we've written (as a reminder). Nothing useful, but tiny proof of concept of HOP. Ah, btw, I recommened him to read chromatic's Modern Perl book. I recomend it to all of you in the Perlsphere. Great book.

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use strict;
	use warnings;
	use feature ':5.10';
	sub idem { shift }
	sub plus_n {
	my $fun = shift;
	my $n = shift;
	return sub {
	$fun->(shift) + $n;
	}
	}
	say idem(3);
	my $anon = sub { shift };
	say $anon->(4);
	my @arr;
	foreach my $i (1..10) {
	push @arr, plus_n($anon,$i);
	}
	foreach my $fun (@arr) {
	say $fun->(1);
	}
	# vim: set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 foldmethod=marker : ###}}}

view raw HOPtest.pl hosted with ❤ by GitHub