On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 11:33 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 4:29 AM, Nobody <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote: >> >> The Church numeral for N is a function of two arguments which applies its >> first argument N times to its second, i.e. (f^N)(x) = f(f(...(f(x))...)). >> > > Thanks - nice clear explanation. Appreciated. For an encore, can you > give an example of where this is actually useful? It seems a pretty > narrow utility.
It's useful for writing mathematical theorems about computability with regard to the natural numbers using lambda calculus. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list