[racket-dev] Fancy application/automatic anonymous functions

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Wed May 18 01:09:49 EDT 2011

Two hours ago, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 
> I second Eli on a second level. 
> 
> As much as I think that syntactic simplicity helps a lot of languages, 
> I don't think this particular kind of simplicity is a major problem or 
> even worth our attention. 
> 
> For a while I decided to try point-free programming. You can do it in 
> Racket as well as in Haskell. Then I ran across someone's rules for 
> writing Scheme and he had written 
> 
>  (lambda (n) (+ x n)) 
> 
> is just as readable if not more than 
> 
>  (curry + x)
> 
> and often (not here) it is shorter. I tested it in my project and
> he's right.

I often reach the same conclusion, despite trying to make it
shorter...



50 minutes ago, Neil Toronto wrote:
> 
> I prefer
> 
>      (λ (n) (+ x n))
> 
> CTRL-\ is one of my best friends when I use a lot of higher-order
> functions in Racket. It just looks so clean.

I recently made some attempts to see how (λ(n) (+ x n)) feels...  One
nice thing about it is that it discourages me from trying to get rid
of the parens with things like (λ n → (+ x n)).

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!



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