Of what use is 'lambda'???

[Kragen Sitaker]

In article <slrn8susbe.au.ssthapa at localhost.localdomain>,
Suchandra Thapa <s-thapa at uchicago.edu> wrote:
>Kragen Sitaker <kragen at dnaco.net> wrote:
>>- functional programmers are a bunch of academics who think up
>>  impractical ideas like garbage collection, arbitrary-precision
>>  numbers, massively parallel computers, and programming languages that
>>  compile into hardware designs, while procedural programmers get real
>>  work done, with a schedule and a budget to overrun.  Real work like
>>  payroll.
>    
>    That's not quite true since Ericsson uses their functional language
>Erlang to write software for their telecom gear and other mission critical
>stuff.

I'm sorry --- the paragraph of mine you quoted is intended as sarcasm.
I suppose I could have added "recursion" to the list to make that more
apparent.  The "impractical ideas" I listed are bread and butter in
today's world; all our CPUs are designed with VHDL and similar things,
most of our supercomputers are massively parallel, most of our
programming languages are garbage-collected, and Python has
arbitrary-precision numbers.
-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]