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A higher-order function is a function that takes a function as an argument or returns one as a result. This is commonly used to customize the behavior of a generically defined function, often a looping construct or recursion scheme. Anonymous functions are a convenient way to specify such function arguments. The following examples are in Python 3.
Lambda calculus is Turing complete, that is, it is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. [3] Its namesake, the Greek letter lambda (λ), is used in lambda expressions and lambda terms to denote binding a variable in a function.
(Here we use the standard notations and conventions of lambda calculus: Y is a function that takes one argument f and returns the entire expression following the first period; the expression . ( ) denotes a function that takes one argument x, thought of as a function, and returns the expression ( ), where ( ) denotes x applied to itself ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
Lambda lifting is expensive on processing time for the compiler. An efficient implementation of lambda lifting is () on processing time for the compiler. [2] In the untyped lambda calculus, where the basic types are functions, lifting may change the result of beta reduction of a lambda expression. The resulting functions will have the same ...
This property is inherited from lambda calculus, where multi-argument functions are usually represented in curried form. Currying is related to, but not the same as partial application . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In practice, the programming technique of closures can be used to perform partial application and a kind of currying, by hiding arguments in an ...
Research has shown that this can be addressed by targeted optimizations, but most functional programming languages instead expand their intermediate representations to contain algebraic data types. [2] Nonetheless Church encoding is often used in theoretical arguments, as it is a natural representation for partial evaluation and theorem proving ...
The generalized curry function is given an uncurried function f and its arity (say, 3), and it returns the value of (lambda (v1) (lambda (v2) (lambda (v3) (f v1 v2 v3)))). This example is due to Olivier Danvy and was worked out in the mid-1980s. [13] Here is a unit-test function to illustrate what the generalized curry function is expected to do: