Ben Scott <dragonh...@gmail.com> writes: > > On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen > <roz...@geekspace.com> wrote: > > > > Don't be afraid to ask (Lf.((Lx.xx) (Lr.f(rr)))). > > > > > > Okay, I'll ask: What does that stuff to the right mean? > > > > The other half of the whole habanero pepper. :) > > Clear as mud! ;-) > > > More lucidly: a combinator. ;) > > Ditto! ;-) > > > It's a pun. ... So maybe it's a deeper (or worse) joke than I > > originally intended.... > > I'll work on appreciating the finer aspects of the joke when I > understand the basics. ;-) > > > > Some kind of LISP? > > > > Almost. Did you have any luck googling for it? :) > > Yah, I found your page, along with a while bunch of your signature > in various archives. ;-) > > And clicking the Google link on your page yields only a handful of > results, some of which are unavailable, none of which seem to explain > things, and one of which is your page again. ;-)
Yes--I actually worked very hard to make things work out that way. :) > From "single-letter name ... phonetically" I eventually decided it > must be "Don't be afraid to ask Y", i.e., "Don't be afraid to ask > why". Yep! But, like I said--it's a pun. Both of those are literally `the correct sentiment' :) > That leads me to finding the below in the Wikipedia article, which > at least looks kinda like your sig: > > Y = λf·(λx·f (x x)) (λx·f (x x)) Yep--that's it! :) That's the non-ASCIIfied version of the "(Lf.((Lx.f(xx)) (Lx.f(xx))))" form in my web-page :) > I'm left thinking of that old meta-joke: "Explaining a joke is like > dissecting a frog: You understand it better, but the frog dies in the > process." ;-) Yeah. I'm hoping that, some day, someone will run across this one and actually just get it--they'll chuckle, send me an e-mail saying `hey, that's cute', and I'll have made a new friend. Much in the same way that one might say, `oh, hey--*you* like really spicy food, too?' and `I see you have a supply of habanero peppers--oh, *you* eat them whole, too?'. In the mean time, I get a lot of responses more like `oh, a vegetable--do you like gardening?' and `you *like* your food *spicy*? Um, OK....'. That's OK, though--it *is* kinda weird :) (and it's not nearly as frustrating as when I was including PGP signatures, and people either said `I can't open your attachment, what is it?' or just `Something's wrong with your e-mail') I realise that I could probably expect success sooner (and more often) if I just asked people to pick a number between 1 and 100 and tried to guess it correctly <http://www.xkcd.com/628/>. Actually, I *did* *once* get the sort response I was awaiting, on alt.collecting.pens-pencils of all places: > It's a programmer's lambda-calculus pun :) And I thought the people who enjoyed those were a dying breed. :-) Glad to see there are a few more of us alive. ;-) Is there anyone here who likes spicy food enough to eat habanero peppers whole (`they just taste like happiness...')? :) > Maybe you should put the whole sig in quotes, so people like me > don't think you're telling us not to be afraid to ask what the stuff > on the right means. ;-) Well, I didn't use a colon.... ;) Hmmm. If I use double-quotes, that seems like it might actually detracts from the functional-programming reference, but semantic (single) quotes would work fine. Er..., the *whole* thing? Hmmm. Well, let's try it! :) Actually, I wonder... maybe unicode has made enough progress for me to just stop substituting the uppercaes "L" for "λ"? -- "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))" _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/