On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 10:37:23PM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote:
I have to recommend "The Little Schemer" also. It really helped me get recursion. But I still don't quite understand the Y combinator or the value of fixed point functions. Need to reread those parts. I have "The Seasoned Schemer" on my bookshelf also which I will dive into once I really understand all of the first book.
Honestly, I'm not sure there really is a practical purpose to the fixed point functions. I've never seem them used in a manner that wouldn't have just been easier expressed more plainly. Most of us use languages with named functions. Simply, the fixed point functions allow you to write recursion of anonymous functions. But, I couldn't explain it. I got to where I could understand it enough to grok some simple code, but it doesn't appear to have stuck. I don't think the Y combinator is useful in a strict (non-lazy) language. It's used some in Haskell, but not really a lot even there. Haskell is full of lots of other things that are hard to understand. It's a good language to learn if you just want to find things that are challenging to learn. David -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
