It is meaningless to nitpick about whether a language is declarative or not since the term "declarative" lacks a good definition. Robert Harper, a programming languages researcher, lists 6 separate definitions and concludes, "It seems to me that none of them have a clear meaning or distinguish a well-defined class of languages. " [1]

[1] http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/what-if-anyt...