Chris Angelico wrote:
for those who
know Greek, it's like calling something an "S-expression", which is
fairly obviously an abbreviation for something. ("Symbolic
expression", I think? Someone might correct me there.)
Yes, except that lambda is an even more arbitrary choice of
letter -- as far as I know, it doesn't stand for anything.
The story goes that, in his handwritten notes, Church used
something like a caret or circumflex. When his work was
published, the typesetter either misread it as a lambda
or subsituted a lambda because it was the closest thing
he had in his font, and from there on it stuck.
Abe Dillon <abedil...@gmail.com> wrote:
I've also argued that the very form of lambda expressions is noisier than it
otherwise needs to be. It's not like noise is only distracting to novice
developers.
If we wanted to be true to the original we should call
them "caret expressions" and write
^(x, y): x + y
Nice and quiet!
--
Greg
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