Nu, re, kā izrādās, bez currying un klauzūrām (terminiem, kas būtībā neko par savu jēdzienisko saturu neizteic neko), arī "lambda" ir radusies vēsturiskas sagadīšanās ceļā.

Tāpēc, ja kādas tehnikas nosaukums tev absolūti neko neizsaka, tam ir iemesli.


Michael S. Mahoney (mike@Princeton.edu), Mon, 09 Aug 1999 17:43:22 -0400:

Scheme took lambda from Lisp, whose creator, John McCarthy, took it from
Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. According to Church's student, J.
Barkley Rosser ("Highlights of the History of the Lambda-Calculus",
Annals of the History of Computing 6,4 [1984], 337-349; at 338), Church
took the notation from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica,
where the class of all x such that f(x) was written as xf(x) with a caret
(^) over the first x. Rosser continues: "Because the new concept
differed quite appreciably from class membership, Church moved the caret
from over the x down to the line just the left of the x; specifically
^xf(x). Later for reasons of typography, an appendage was added to the
caret to product a lambda; the result was xf(x)." (The original
has, of course, the Greek letter where I have written .)

For the early history of the lambda calculus, see Rosser's article and
that of his fellow graduate student, Stephen C. Kleene, "Origins of
Recursive Function Theory", in Annals of the History of Computing
3,1(1981), 52-67.

Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, 20lpp:

The name "lambda" comes from the mathematician Alonzo Church's notation for functions (Church 1941). Lisp usually prefers expressive names over terse Greek letters, but lambda is an exception. A better name would be "make-function".


(Piezīmēšu gan ka tas ir pizģec tā pateikt "Lisp usually prefers expressive names over terse greek letters" un tajā pat lappusē izmantot "mapcar" - kas būtībā ir tikai nesaprasts foreach.)