Comment by dahart

If there was one single thing I learned from my functional programming class in college, it’s that there exists a way to implement imperative programming in a pure functional language. I distinctly remember the aha that Turing complete means Turing complete, and functional vs imperative is a style that can be emulated in any Turing complete language. Now for the life of me I can’t remember what the exact trick or mechanism was, does anyone know what I’m talking about? I’m pretty sure it leveraged one of the named functional constructs, similar to a thunk or y-combinator or something. I’m old enough that use of “monad” wasn’t much of a thing at the time.