Programming Paradigms Introduction to Functional Programming in Scheme
Referential Transparency
Referential transparency is a rather fuzzy and ambiguous idea
On this page we will quote and address different phrasings
Uday Reddy, Stack Overflow
The term "reference" is used in analytical philosophy to talk about the thing that an expression refers to. ...
A context in a sentence is "referentially transparent" if replacing a term in that context by another term that refers to the same entity
doesn't alter the meaning.
Stoy
The only things that matters about an expression is its value, and any subexpression can be replaced by any other equal in value
Wikipedia (as of August 5, 2013)
An expression is said to be referentially transparent if it can be replaced with its value without changing the behavior of a program
Landin
(a) each expression has a nesting subexpression structure,
(b) each subexpression denotes something (usually a number, truth value or numerical function),
(c) the thing an expression denotes, i.e., its "value", depends only on the values of its sub-expressions, not on other properties of them.
Bird and Wadler
The value of an expression depends only on the values of its constituent expressions (if any)
and these subexpressions may be replaced freely by others possessing the same value
Stack Overflow, Brian Bondy
Referential transparency ... means that given a function and an input value, you will always receive the same output.
KN
In a given context, two expressions that are equal to each other may substitute each other
