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Tony Sidaway (talk | contribs) 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. |
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'''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. The method is named for [[Alonzo Church]], who first encoded data in the lambda calculus this way.
Terms that are usually considered primitive in other 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.
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