Editing Functional programming (section)

=== Pure functions ===
{{main|Pure function}}
[[Pure function]]s (or expressions) have no [[side effect (computer science)|side effects]] (memory or I/O). This means that pure functions have several useful properties, many of which can be used to optimize the code:
* If the result of a pure expression is not used, it can be removed without affecting other expressions.
* If a pure function is called with arguments that cause no side-effects, the result is constant with respect to that argument list (sometimes called [[referential transparency]] or [[idempotence]]), i.e., calling the pure function again with the same arguments returns the same result. (This can enable caching optimizations such as [[memoization]].)
* If there is no data dependency between two pure expressions, their order can be reversed, or they can be performed in [[parallelization|parallel]] and they cannot interfere with one another (in other terms, the evaluation of any pure expression is [[thread-safe]]).
* If the entire language does not allow side-effects, then any evaluation strategy can be used; this gives the compiler freedom to reorder or combine the evaluation of expressions in a program (for example, using [[deforestation (computer science)|deforestation]]).

While most compilers for imperative programming languages detect pure functions and perform common-subexpression elimination for pure function calls, they cannot always do this for pre-compiled libraries, which generally do not expose this information, thus preventing optimizations that involve those external functions. Some compilers, such as [[GNU Compiler Collection|gcc]], add extra keywords for a programmer to explicitly mark external functions as pure, to enable such optimizations. [[Fortran 95]] also lets functions be designated ''pure''.<ref name=fortran95>{{cite web |title=ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG5/N2137 – Fortran 2015 Committee Draft (J3/17-007r2) |publisher=International Organization for Standardization |date=July 6, 2017 |url=https://wg5-fortran.org/N2101-N2150/N2137.pdf |pages=336–338}}</ref> C++11 added <code>constexpr</code> keyword with similar semantics.