Re: Scheme learning

[Hans Åberg]

> On 28 May 2018, at 21:47, Robert Schmaus <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I agree with you - when I looked at the Scheme functions (mainly as Snippets) 
> I saw that it's not very complicated. It was just when I tried to customise 
> something that I really had to do a lot of guesswork how to get this to work. 
> Does this expression return something or not? What does "lambda" mean, why 
> does this expression need a context and where do I get it from?

The lambda comes from the book by Alonzo Church, "The Calculi of 
Lambda-conversion", which is a logic theory about function applications, but it 
is unknown why he choose the letter lambda, though a prefix notation makes it 
easier to carry out formal proofs. It then caught on in the computer community.

Instead of a prefix lambda notation, one can use the infix "mapsto" notation, 
and there are some examples here:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus