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copied!<p>Off the top of my head:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy" rel="noreferrer"><em>lazy</em> vs. <em>eager</em></a> (aka <em>non-strict</em> vs. <em>strict</em> or <em>call-by-need</em> vs. <em>call-by-value</em>): are function arguments evaluated before the function application, or after, or never?</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_(computer_science)" rel="noreferrer"><em>pure</em> vs. <em>impure</em></a>: does the language allow functions to have side effects? Does it have mutable references?</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system" rel="noreferrer"><em>static</em> vs. <em>dynamic</em></a>: does the language check types at compile time or runtime?</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type" rel="noreferrer"><em>algebraic datatypes</em></a>: does the language support pattern matching over variant types?</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming" rel="noreferrer"><em>metaprogramming</em></a>: does the language provide a powerful code generation system?</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrency" rel="noreferrer"><em>concurrency</em></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism" rel="noreferrer"><em>parallelism</em></a>: are threads/processes a first-class abstraction? Does the language make it easy to run multiple computations at the same time?</li> <li><em>"exotic" types</em>: how expressive is the static type system? GADTs? Dependent types? Linear types? System F?</li> </ul> <p>Only the first two items are really unique to functional languages (i.e., almost all imperative languages are eager and impure).</p>

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