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Discussion on: Tell me some useless (or useful) software trivia

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kenbellows profile image
Ken Bellows • Edited

We call anonymous functions 'lambdas' either because the Greek letter was easier to print than a hat, or because someone played eenie-meenie-minie-mo

Can you elaborate on this one? "Lambdas" are named after the lambda calculus, which originated in the 1930s... Is the stuff about hats and eenie-meenie related to the name of the lambda calculus?

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gypsydave5 profile image
David Wickes

Willingly. You'll find most of it on the Wikipedia page under History, but in brief:

  • either Alonzo Church picked a random Greek letter, in his own words by eenie-meenie.

  • or he started with a 'hat' over a variable - like ê - which got shifted to the left to become an upside down V. Which looks like a capital lambda, and so it was lowercased.