Is this another way of putting what you're saying?
In functional programming, we think of computation as reducing an expression; a computation is complete when it can't be reduced anymore. In imperative programming, we think of computation as updating a store of data; a computation is complete when we run out of steps to perform.
When you're partway through execution, the "rest of the program" in an imperative system is captured by the current state of the store (including the stack). In a functional program, the "rest of the program" is just the program expression itself, reduced as it has been up to this point.
I tend to like the functional model, myself, but I can see the mental appeal of keeping the program text fixed, and isolating all changes to a separate store of data.
In functional programming, we think of computation as reducing an expression; a computation is complete when it can't be reduced anymore. In imperative programming, we think of computation as updating a store of data; a computation is complete when we run out of steps to perform.
When you're partway through execution, the "rest of the program" in an imperative system is captured by the current state of the store (including the stack). In a functional program, the "rest of the program" is just the program expression itself, reduced as it has been up to this point.
I tend to like the functional model, myself, but I can see the mental appeal of keeping the program text fixed, and isolating all changes to a separate store of data.