Conversation

tbh I don't remember, if I ever knew, what features the formalism that name got borrowed from requires for functions

eleanor

@zornsllama

Oct 26, 2020

To your mind, does a "lambda function" intuitively require the possibility of closure?

David Smith

@Catfish_Man

Oct 26, 2020

None of the languages I use day to day use that term, so I would mentally translate it into something more familiar like "closure" or "block" and then be a little startled when I couldn't capture anything. Swift calls these "thin closures", but I think that's one we made up.

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Oct 27, 2020

many GC’d languages don’t make any distinction based on whether something closes over variables or not; Ruby’s distinctions are particularly weird; Haskell programmers only differentiate syntactically (top-level vs. where clause vs. lambda) and ghc does whatever it wants anyway

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Oct 27, 2020

typically I’d say “lambda” to mean “function written inline in an expression” or even “function written with the \ syntax,” but I’d roughly consider “function” and “lambda” synonymous.

eleanor

@zornsllama

Oct 27, 2020

unfortunately, the language I'm implementing calls functions "procedures", so things get hairy fast

eleanor

@zornsllama

Oct 27, 2020

(the original language does not allow return values, but I added it on top)

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Oct 27, 2020

Tbh if the functions are side-effecty, I'm completely on board with the 'procedure' naming! I tried to get rid of all greek-letter-named stuff in Pikelet and just call things 'functions' and 'pairs' etc.