Talk:Anonymous recursion: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:31, 2 November 2005

Revision as of 16:31, 8 November 2005

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The Y combinator section is just plain confusing -- the central point is ill-defined and the derivation is informal and unfocused. The metaphorical explanation at the end, especially, is misleading and unnecessary.

In short, flagging for cleanup.

--[[User:Donhalcon|bmills]] 18:51, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

>>How is this article not redundant with the [[Fixed point combinator]] article?<< <br>

:The introduction and the example are independent of the Y combinator: only the "Y combinator" section should overlap with the fixed point combinator article. The "Y combinator" section was attached as an afterthought, it is not really necessary for the article: only the top part is necessary (if this article should survive at all). This article offers a way of defining anonymous recursion which is alternative to using the Y combinator: the last section just shows how the two approaches are related. &mdash;[[User:AugPi|AugPi]] 20:10, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

::The article basically describes the encoding of recursive functions as functions which take themselves as arguments. Such an encoding is how one writes a function to be made recursive with a fixed point operator, although generally in lambda calculus encodings the function is the first argument rather than the second. The only real difference between the kind of encoding described here and use of a fixed point combinator is that the combinator automates the passing of f to itself -- this is why we have the &lambda;x. f (x x) term in the Y combinator. This seems to be the core idea of this article, although I'm not convinced that that idea can't be explained more clearly in a succinct paragraph in [[fixed point combinator]]. --[[User:Donhalcon|bmills]] 16:31, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

>> the function markup in the introduction doesn't display properly<<