Not entirely nonsense—immutability is helpful even in the absence of referential transparency—but still, a “pure” keyword would be great. Now, what I’d really like is for the type system to be flipped on its head with respect to immutability: make “const” the default and explicitly qualify mutable types with “mutable”. A guy can dream…
Perhaps you should take a look at Rust.[1] It's a pretty compelling union of functional and procedural paradigms, plus: immutability by default, the ability to annotate functions as pure, pattern matching, option types, good C compatibility, strong support for concurrency, high-level memory management that guarantees memory safety and that doesn't require tedious memory micromanagement (while retaining the option to just GC everything and forget about it), and a lot more. Still alpha software at the moment, though.
yeah, i'm excited about rust. i'm currently diving into d, and while it is a lot nicer than c++ (and i've barely started discovering all its features), i really miss pattern matching, option types and everything-is-an-expression, which i've gotten used to from other languages. it looks like rust supports all three of those features, which already puts it closer to my sweet spot.
I’ve looked into it. Seems like a promising language, and it does quite a few things right. Still, I feel a bit uncomfortable endorsing it wholesale while I work on my own linguistic magnum opus. ;)
