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Let's Talk About Lambda Functions!

Bryan Olson fakeaddress at nowhere.org
Sun Jul 28 02:45:22 EDT 2002 
Paul Rubin wrote:

 > There's a middle ground that says the name "lambda" (which comes from
 > Lisp) wasn't a good choice and another name should have been used
 > instead, like maybe 'func', which does the same thing.  I guess that's
 > reasonable.  I'm used to lambda from Lisp but another name would
 > probably be less scary to non-Lisp-users.

I agree, though the name "lambda" actually pre-dates Lisp.  It comes
from Alonzo Church's "lambda Calculous" of the 1930's.

ML uses "fn", which like "func" reads beautifully.  The construct ceases
to be arcane when people hear that "lambda x: x * 2 + 3" reads as "that
function which applied to x, returns x * 2 + 3".


--Bryan
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