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As far as I know, it isn't. I just figured that anyone who understand '\' might understand 'λ' as well. And those who don't know Haskell might just figure tha
by loup-vaillant 14y ago
As far as I know, it isn't. I just figured that anyone who understand '\' might understand 'λ' as well. And those who don't know Haskell might just figure that 'λ' stands for 'function'.
- anonymouz 14y agoBut in that way your Haskell code examples seem to not be valid Haskell anymore. Seems to be a rather pointless change for the sake of simply breaking things.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoWell, given this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278883 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278883 I now believe the notation needs to be explained anyway. I'll switch back to '\'.
- kyllo 14y agoLisp and Ruby, among other languages, actually use the word 'lambda' as a keyword for declaring an anonymous function. It's more typing than "\", but the intent is clear. I don't think Haskell is really the best choice of language for demonstrating these FP concepts simply because Haskell's syntax is a little cryptic to those who haven't studied it. Lisp would have been a more readable choice since the syntax is trivial. Also, you didn't touch on recursion, which is a key concept in FP. The idea of having a function call itself repeatedly in order to loop through a data structure, instead of iterating over the data structure by mutating a counter variable, is a huge paradigm shift for people who are new to FP.
- eru 14y agoYes. But in practice we almost never recurse through a data structure directly. We once recursively define a combinator to fold the datastructure, and then always use that combinator for working with the data structure.