[Raphael_Amiard]

I downvoted you because i think you're flat out wrong, both on the functional account and on the generic account. Although i'm curious, how would you do generic programming in C a language in which you can't even define a generic list type without renouncing to static typing ?

[jacquesm]

You do realise that the first version of the C++ compiler was a pre-processor for the C compiler ? And that in the end all this stuff outputs assembly language ?

As for functional programming someone just released a lisp for PHP. That doesn't mean it's the 'right' way to do stuff, but it can be done, and programming 'generically' was done for years before someone took the time to produce a language for it. I've written piles of code that would write programs (usually C) to avoid having to write the same kind of code with slight variations.

In the end all this stuff is Turing complete, so if you can do something in one language, by simple reasoning you can figure out that you can do that trick in any other by implementing a (subset of) the former.