Prompts for "Introduction to the Lambda Calculus, Part 1"
Due on Wednesday, February 26 by 11:59pm
Commit your response as a PDF to your short responses repository. You are encouraged (but not required) to use LaTeX to typeset your response.
- Generate any two valid lambda expressions, except
x
,λx.x
, andλx.xx
, using the grammar given in the reading. - Draw the parse trees for those two expressions.
- As mentioned in the reading, the lambda calculus is capable of expressing all computable functions. In a sense, this means that it is the most powerful programming language that we know. Why, then, do we have so many programming languages? Supposing for a moment that both C and Java are as powerful as the lambda calculus (hint: they are), why bother making a new language?