Re: Lua Digest, Vol 78, Issue 2

[Vyacheslav Egorov <mraleph@...>]

KHMan wrote:
> From the little I know or understand of lambda calculus, it's
> about anonymous functions.
One can use  Y Combinator to implement recursion using only anonymous 
functions.

local function Y(f)
 function rec(...) return f(rec, ...) end
 return rec
end

local fac = Y(function(fac, n) if n == 1 then return 1 else return fac(n 
- 1) * n end end)


In fact one can turn Y in purely anonymous function. It is expensive, 
but possible. See Wikipedia or some good old book (e.g. Essentials of 
Programming Languages) for more details.

--
e.v.e