Blocks and pure functions

new to ruby, i’ve been reading http://www.rubycentral.com/book/intro.html
and like the look of it a lot.

the section on blocks and iterators reminded me strongly of the use of the
pure functions that i use routinely in mathematica (no pun intended). i
believe that the pure function is a general concept in computer language
theory, though i know little about that field. is there a correspondence? or
am i going to confuse myself with this notion?

c u
fsb