I don't know if this is how they got their name, but "Y Combinators" pre-date the company by many years, and are how (some) functional languages implement recur

I don't know if this is how they got their name, but "Y Combinators" pre-date the company by many years, and are how (some) functional languages implement recursion/looping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Y_combinator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Y_combin...