Revision as of 19:24, 25 October 2005 edit David Wahler (talk \| contribs) 491 edits →Church booleans: changed to {{sect-stub}} ← Previous edit		Revision as of 14:06, 27 October 2005 edit undo Tony Sidaway (talk \| contribs) Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers 81,722 edits As church numeral etc now map here and are likely to be the most common entry path, put something about them into the opening sentence. Next edit →
Line 1: '''Church encoding''' is a means of embedding data and operators into the [[lambda calculus]]., the most familiar form being the church numerals, a representation of the natural numbers using lambda notation. Terms that are usually considered primitive in other ~~languages~~notations (such as integers, booleans, pairs, lists, and tagged unions) are mapped to [[higher-order function]]s under Church encoding; from the [[Church-Turing thesis]] we know that any computable operator (and its operands) can be represented under Church encoding. Many students of mathematics are familiar with [[Gödel numbering]] members of a set; Church encoding is an equivalent operation defined on [[lambda abstraction]]s instead of natural numbers.

Church encoding: Difference between revisions