July 13, 2016
8:51 a.m.
On 13 July 2016 at 05:00, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Not too many people like Cobol-like spelling:
add 1 to the_number
over "n += 1". So I think that arguments for keeping "traditional spelling" are mostly about familiarity. If we learned lambda calculus in high school, perhaps λ would be less exotic.
It's probably also relevant in this context that more "modern" languages tend to avoid the term lambda but embrace "anonymous functions" with syntax such as (x, y) -> x+y or whatever. So while "better syntax for lambda expressions" is potentially a reasonable goal, I don't think that perpetuating the concept/name "lambda" is necessary or valuable. Paul