On Dec 4, 2008, at 5:44 PM, Eugene Lazutkin wrote:
If you started to recap the history of this discussion, could you (or
anybody else in the know) verbalize following things:
1) What is the difference between the function and the lambda? I am
not
talking about their syntax, I want to understand the semantic
difference, if there is any.
Please read
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:lambdas
2) Why is it important for a lambda to have an optional name?
It may not be.
What's
wrong with using a function, if we want a name? IMHO lambda should
have
the minimalistic syntax.
"Minimalistic" does not define itself. The question is what is the
minimal syntax given various constraints.
Church's Lambdas take one argument only. One can curry by hand. Why
isn't that the minimum minimum?
3) Why is it important to be able to specify parameter defaults in
lambda? Again, it looks like an extra sugar to me that can be
covered by
a function with parameter defaults.
See
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-October/007715.html
Also consider that default parameters are a convenience we want
lambdas to have if we believe functions should be avoided for much
lambda-coding by hand. The countervailing argument is that lambdas
have unintended completion value hazards, but Schemers and others
don't worry about these and would prefer not to have to run back to
functions and lose Tennent's Correspondence Principle every time
default parameters beckon.
The reason I ask is a lot of discussion is going around "but if it
has a
name" and "but if it has a default". If it doesn't have a name I would
be satisfied personally with \(a, b) {...} --- it doesn't clash with
anything. Or even with \(a, b) expr.
You're right to question name to rescue \, but trying to minimize
lambdas won't save all the proposed syntaxes. We're making progress in
finding some to be in trouble, if not fatally flawed.
/be
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