Ben Schmidt wrote:
That use of lambda exists in colloquial contemporary French. In the French
wikipedia, under Lambda (homonymie), the first title is as follows:
Adjectif
* Le mot lambda est souvent utilisé comme adjectif pour qualifier une
entité indéfinie quelconque.
* Un utilisateur lambda est une personne qui utilise un système de la
même manière que la majorité des utilisateurs, sans chercher à exploiter des
fonctionnalités avancées.
which I translate as:
Adjective
* The word lambda is often used as an adjective to qualify any undefined
quantity.
As a native English speaker, I would translate it as any 'indefinite'
quantity.
Hm, yes, sorry. With its dual Germanic and Romance vocabulary heritage,
English often has two (or more) non-exactly-synonymous equivalents for one
French word, and it isn't always easy to choose the right one. For instance I
don't quite grasp the difference between 'freedom' and 'liberty'.
* A lambda user is a person who uses a system in the same way as the
majority
of the users, not trying to use advanced functionalities.
I think 'ordinary' would suit as a translation of 'lambda' in this context,
as
well as in the context you originally used it:
Or is # just a lambda 'iskeyword' character when it
applies to a variable?
'Regular' would also suffice.
Another possibility for the 'lambda user' might be a 'naive user'.
Yes, I think you got it.
Your English is extremely good, Tony. It took quite a few of your posts
before I
realised it wasn't your native tongue, and even then, I'm not sure it was the
English that gave the game away!
Ben.
Thanks for the compliment. I realised in high school that my Daddy had a lot
of interesting books in English, which I didn't want to pass by. Nowadays I
regard myself as fluent in English, but I know that in a difficult
controversy I would be (all other things being equal) at a disadvantage to
someone born to the language.
As I once heard say: it's easy to speak English at the level a Japanese uses
it to ask directions in Moscow, but to speak /good/ English is extremely
difficult for a non-native (and even for some natives, apparently, but this is
a different question).
(As long as politicians dismiss Esperanto before even checking what it can do,
politicians from English-speaking countries will hold an unfair advantage in
all international institutions.)
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight
are unimportant.
-- Henry Miller
--~--~-~--~~~---~--~~
You received this message from the vim_dev maillist.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
-~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
