What tools are there for functional programming in C?

Question

I\'ve been thinking a lot lately about how to go about doing functional programming in C (not C++). Obviously, C is a procedural language and doesn\'t really support f

Answer 1

The main thing that comes to mind is the use of code generators. Would you be willing to program in a different language that provided the functional programming and then generate the C code from that?

If that's not an attractive option, then you could abuse CPP to get part of the way there. The macro system should let you emulate some functional programming ideas. I've heard tell that gcc is implemented this way but I've never checked.

C can of course pass functions around using function pointers, the main problems are lack of closures and the type system tends to get in the way. You could explore more powerful macro systems than CPP such as M4. I guess ultimately, what I'm suggesting is that true C isn't up to the task without great effort but you could extend C to make it be up to the task. That extension would look the most like C if you use CPP or you could go to the other end of the spectrum and generate C code from some other language.