On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 8:31 PM, Abe Dillon <abedil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > [Steven D'Aprano] > >> ...if we aren't even willing to move out of our own comfort zone to >> the extent of learning accurate jargon terms from our own profession? > > > Very few of us are computer scientists by profession. That's not even > where 'lambda' comes from. In computer science, it's called an "anonymous > function". "lambda" comes from lambda calculus. > Lambda calculus IS computer science. Rejecting lambda as CS is as bad as rejecting the + operator because that's mathematics. I can legitimately argue that + in Python is not the + in mathematics because the Python mathematical operators operate on integers and floats, not real numbers. Therefore we should use a different word like "floatadd". Of course not. Lambda calculus is a model of computation. It was invented about 30 years before the name "computer science" but is nonetheless foundational computer science. If using lambda as a keyword leads people to go and learn about lambda calculus that is a good thing. And as to saying a lambda function is an "anonymous function": the anonymity is not a property of the function. If I assign it to a name, it's no longer anonymous. Really a "lambda" or "lambda function" is just a function, but "lambda" is a synecdoche for "function created with a lambda expression". --- Bruce
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