Question

Can anybody give a clear explanation? What is a wholemeal programming in functional programming area. All I’ve found is that wholemeal is a

focusing on entire data structures rather than their elements

but how can it be archived?
(Code examples in such languages as Scala or Ocaml are very desirable.)

Answer 1

“Functional languages excel at wholemeal programming, a term coined by
Geraint Jones. Wholemeal programming means to think big: work with an
entire list, rather than a sequence of elements; develop a solution
space, rather than an individual solution; imagine a graph, rather
than a single path. The wholemeal approach often offers new insights
or provides new perspectives on a given problem. It is nicely
complemented by the idea of projective programming: first solve a more
general problem, then extract the interesting bits and pieces by
transforming the general program into more specialised ones.”

I also found this

it helps prevent a disease called “indexitis” and encourages lawful
program construction (from “Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design”,
Richard Bird, 2010)

See also (http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/publications/ICFP09.pdf)