Data Flow and Functional Programming

Abstract

In the conventional (or imperative) programming languages the order of execution is determined by the program text and is referred to as the control flow of the program. In addition, it is possible to use the same variable name in different parts of a program and as a consequence of this the variable can be changed several times. In a sense, it is very difficult to detect any dependency that was involved between computations. This problem can be more complex if there is any transfer of flow control such as the goto statement in the computations.