One of the characteristics of functional programming is first class functions. First-class functions behave like data and are heavily used in the Standard Template Library.

The definition of functional programming is quite easy. Functional programming is the programming with mathematical functions. Is that all? Of course, not!

Which functional feature can we expect with C++17, for which functional feature can we hope for with C++20? This is exactly the question I will concisely answer in this post.

My favourite example the dispatch table shows how nice the features in modern C++ work together. A dispatch table is a table of pointers to functions. In my case, it is a table of handles to polymorphic function wrappers.

In this post, our journey through the functional features of classical, modern, and future C++ continues. Today, we stop in the present.

C++ is not a functional programming language but you can program in a functional style. What are the functional features in C++? I will answer this question for C++98.

C++ is not a functional programming language. C++ has its roots in the procedural and object-oriented programming. So it's quite surprising that programming in a functional style becomes more and more important in C++. That is not only true for C++. That holds also for python, which has a lot of functional features and even for Java. Now Java has lambda-functions.