On Mon, 28 Mar 2016 06:51 pm, Jussi Piitulainen wrote: > Ben Bacarisse writes: > >> It's shame that anonymous functions (for that's what's being returned >> here -- a function with no name) were born of a subject that used >> arbitrary Greek letters for things. We seem stuck with the mysterious >> but meaningless "lambda" for a very simple and useful idea.
I'm not sure that "lambda" is any more mysterious or meaningless than other terms used in computing. What's a closure? A trampoline? A future? Mapping? Thread? Greenlet? Mantissa? Not to mention terms from mathematics that people simply memorise, like "sin", "cos", "power". Not to mention "Monad". I don't think *anyone* knows what a Monad is ;-) > Well said. > > Python should have called it "fun". As in the 80s pop hit by Cyndia Lauper, "Girls Just Wanna Have Anonymous Functions"? > I have heard that the use of lambda for this purpose was originally not > an arbitrary choice but a typographical accident. A misinterpreted caret > or something. I also seem to remember that I've seen some discussion on > whether the story is true or not, but I forget which way it went. I don't know whether or not it is true, but I've heard the same thing. Quote: (Note: it may seem perverse to use lambda to introduce a procedure/function. The notation goes back to Alonzo Church, who in the 1930's started with a "hat" symbol; he wrote the square function as "ŷ . y × y". But frustrated typographers moved the hat to the left of the parameter and changed it to a capital lambda: "Λy . y × y"; from there the capital lambda was changed to lowercase, and now we see "λy . y × y" in math books and (lambda (y) (* y y)) in Lisp. If it were up to me, I'd use fun or maybe ^. ) http://norvig.com/lispy2.html -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
