On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 17:58:11 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: > On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Aside from the sin of spelling out "lambda," >> should be ( \x y -> x + y ) a b ) but, neither here nor >> there... > > Well no, it *should* be λx y . x + y but apparently some people don't > have that character on their keyboards, so it gets written as lambda or > \ instead.
Holy cow! Is that where the Haskell syntax comes from? I never would have guessed in a million years that backslash \ was meant to be an ASCII-ified version of lambda. What a stupid idea that is. Writing "lambda" out in full is much more sensible. > Personally I dislike the \ style; it doesn't really resemble > a λ that closely, and to me the backslash denotes escape sequences and > set differences. Nor is Python alone in spelling out lambda: Scheme and > Common Lisp spell it the same way. As far as I know the \ for λ is > unique to Haskell. At least they don't spell it "fun". -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
