Lambda Calculus

Having covered types, let’s now turn our attention to lists. Lists are general purpose data structures for storing sequences of items. In lambda calculus, lists are represented using pairs, with the first item of the pair representing the head of the list, and the second item representing the rest of the list. A special value, nil, at as the second item of the pair terminates the list. Pairs Let’s start by focusing on pairs (or tuples). A pair is built from two arguments, \(a\) and \(b\), and returns a function \(f\) enclosing those two arguments: ...

Lambda calculus is a very simple language. If you take away any syntactic sugar, all you are left with is functions that take arguments and return results. You can use these simple building blocks to construct functions that represent numbers and arithmetic, but there is no way to restrict, for example, arithmetic functions to require numeric operands. This is where types come in. Generally speaking, types allow you to control the use of functions so that only meaningful combinations of inputs and outputs are used. ...

In a purely functional language — like lambda calculus — programs are expressed as nested function calls. Repetition in such an environment requires that nesting of function calls continues until some condition is met. During the repetition, each function passes its result to the next function in the nested chain and this repetition is completed when a test for some condition passes. The repetitive behaviour I’ve just described is recursion: ...

Evaluating lambda functions requires using lots of brackets, which can be tedious and are a major source of error for evaluating expressions by hand. To simplify expressions, you can omit brackets when it is clear what the intention of the function is. Particularly, a function application can omit the brackets surrounding each individual parameter and assume the function is applied to the nearest argument. So, instead of expressing a function of three arguments as ...

Lambda calculus provides some of the foundational structures that functional programming is built from. It therefore seems fitting to start my journey through functional programming with a thorough examination of lambda calculus. This first post will introduce Lambda calculus with references to the book An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus. Syntax The complete syntax for Lambda calculus is surprisingly small and comprehensible. This section lists the syntax in its entirety, while following sections break the syntax down to explain each part. ...