What Does Referential Transparency Mean?
Referential transparency is a property of a specific part of a program or a programming language, especially functional programming languages like Haskell and R. An expression in a program is said to be referentially transparent if it can be replaced with its value and the resulting behavior is the same as before the change. This means that the program’s behavior is not changed whether the input used is a reference or an actual value that the reference is pointing to.
Techopedia Explains Referential Transparency
Referential transparency has its roots in analytical philosophy, which is a branch of philosophy that studies natural language constructs, arguments and statements based on the methods of mathematics and logic and has little to do with programming, although it has been adopted by computer scientists.
