[mikekchar]

I suspect it was a product of the OP's musing about errors. Side effects are common in programming languages outside of pure functional languages. When you have a pure functional language, what do you do if the type you are returning can't represent an error? You also can't have side effects (for example throw an exception), so it's doubly important that you make sure your return type can encode errors. I suspect that's all they meant. The choice of wording was just unfortunate (especially the use of "procedural" -- what do I do if I can't return values??? ;-) ).