Functional programming and multicore architecture

Question

I\'ve read somewhere that functional programming is suitable to take advantage of multi-core trend in computing. I didn\'t really get the idea. Is it related to the lambda c

Answer 1

The basic argument is that it is difficult to automatically parallelize languages like C/C++/etc because functions can set global variables. Consider two function calls:

a = foo(b, c);
d = bar(e, f);

Though foo and bar have no arguments in common and one does not depend on the return code of the other, they nonetheless might have dependencies because foo might set a global variable (or other side effect) which bar depends upon.

Functional languages guarantee that foo and bar are independant: there are no globals, and no side effects. Therefore foo and bar could be safely run on different cores, automatically, without programmer intervention.