Referential transparency is a property of expressions in programming where an expression can be replaced with its corresponding value without changing the program's behavior. It is a fundamental aspect of functional programming, enabling easier reasoning about code and facilitating optimizations like memoization and parallelization.

Referential Transparency

Referential transparency

property of expressions

Programming behavior

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing state or mutable data. It emphasizes the use of pure functions, higher-order functions, and immutable data structures to promote code that is predictable, easier to test, and inherently parallelizable.

functional programming

easier reasoning about code

Code optimizations

Memoization is an optimization technique used to improve the efficiency of algorithms by storing the results of expensive function calls and reusing them when the same inputs occur again. It is particularly useful in dynamic programming and recursive algorithms, reducing time complexity at the cost of increased space usage.

memoization

Parallelization is the process of dividing a computational task into smaller, independent tasks that can be executed simultaneously across multiple processors or cores, thereby reducing the overall execution time. It is a fundamental technique in high-performance computing and is essential for efficiently utilizing modern multi-core and distributed computing architectures.

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