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Lambda calculus is Turing complete, that is, it is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. [3] Its namesake, the Greek letter lambda (λ), is used in lambda expressions and lambda terms to denote binding a variable in a function.
The purpose of β-reduction is to calculate a value. A value in lambda calculus is a function. So β-reduction continues until the expression looks like a function abstraction. A lambda expression that cannot be reduced further, by either β-redex, or η-redex is in normal form. Note that alpha-conversion may convert functions.
The Y combinator is an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus. Fixed-point combinators may also be easily defined in other functional and imperative languages. The implementation in lambda calculus is more difficult due to limitations in lambda calculus. The fixed-point combinator may be used in a number of different areas:
In mathematical logic, the de Bruijn index is a tool invented by the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn for representing terms of lambda calculus without naming the bound variables. [1] Terms written using these indices are invariant with respect to α-conversion, so the check for α-equivalence is the same as that for syntactic ...
In computer science, lambda calculi are said to have explicit substitutions if they pay special attention to the formalization of the process of substitution.This is in contrast to the standard lambda calculus where substitutions are performed by beta reductions in an implicit manner which is not expressed within the calculus; the "freshness" conditions in such implicit calculi are a notorious ...
The latter is guaranteed by the strong confluence property of reduction in this model of computation. Thus interaction nets provide a natural language for massive parallelism. Interaction nets are at the heart of many implementations of the lambda calculus, such as efficient closed reduction [2] and optimal, in Lévy's sense, Lambdascope. [3]
In the untyped lambda calculus, all functions are higher-order; in a typed lambda calculus, from which most functional programming languages are derived, higher-order functions that take one function as argument are values with types of the form ().
The three axes of the cube correspond to three different augmentations of the simply typed lambda calculus: the addition of dependent types, the addition of polymorphism, and the addition of higher kinded type constructors (functions from types to types, for example). The lambda cube is generalized further by pure type systems.