The Why of Y
Sunday, September 7, 2003
Pascal Costanza pointed out (via email) that the recursive lambda example that I gave from Paul Graham's On Lisp book yesterday goes back to the Y combinator concept and recommended a paper that Richard Gabriel wrote called The Why of Y. From memory, the book The Little Schemer also goes into a pedagogical explanation of Y towards the end of the book. I remember at the time thinking that my head was going to explode from trying to understand all the lambda's! Actually, I just checked and SICP has a similar example (Exercise 4.21 in Section 4.1.6) to the one in Paul's book (something that I hadn't realized when I made the original posting).
