Those of us who are prefer functional and logic programming look at Sanskrit as the first functional logic language.
After all, which other language has currying as a native word ?
Currying in Functional Languages
Functional languages such as Haskell and ML enjoy the benefits of function currying. Currying is the incomplete application of arguments to a function. For example, in Haskell we could write the function mult which takes two integers and returns their product
mult x y = x * y Evaluating mult 2 6 would yield 12, as expected. To curry a function, one needs only to leave off one or more of the rightmost arguments. (Argument application must occur in a left-to-right order.) Evaluating mult 2 would yield the curried function (mult 2), which is a function of arity 1 (meaning it expects 1 argument). An argument can be applied to this function by evaluating (mult 2) 6, for instance. The inclusion of parentheses is important because it distinguishes the application of one argument to a curried function from the application of two arguments to a non-curried function.
Functions can be built of curried functions as
double = mult 2 (or equivalently)
double = (*) 2 where (*) is the prefix application of the infix multiplication operator. The expression (2 *) is equivalent to (*) 2, but prefix operators are better for understanding function currying. Evaluating double 6 then yields 12.
