Purity

A couple of Artima posts, "Pure and Impure Functions" and "In Defense of Pattern Matching".

An I quote: "A pure function is one which has no side-effects and does not depend on any state beyond its local scope. This means that it can be replaced with any other pure function which returns the same result given the same input. This property is often referred to as referential transparency...some impure functions, can become pure when they are passed constant values."

"I think pattern matching is extremely convenient and is a good fit with object-oriented programming. I wonder why not more mainstream languages have adopted it."

Links to Scala. I was recently looking at Clean. And if you really want to, "Functional Programming in Java: More fun with Generics and CGLib" "They are Java instance methods which are pure-functional, that is, without side-effects, and do not reference any object fields or non-static variables. Essentially, they are non-mutating static functions declared without a static qualifier."