3Daet.com | Y-combinator

Y-combinator is a way of defining a function that can call itself without the define function.

Y-combinator is a way of defining a function that can call itself without the define function.

Date Created:Tuesday September 30th, 2008 10:43 AM
Date Modified:Tuesday January 19th, 2010 10:35 PM

First, create the function for passing in the parameters:

(lambda (x)

Now, create the function that will pass the function that it receives as input into that function that it receives. Let function a be the function we are creating. Function b is an argument to a. Function a will call b with b as an argument to b, along with its argument. This is what we call the "Y-combinator":

(lambda (f n) (f f n))

Now create the function that actually does what we want. the procedure we may want to call it.

(lambda (factorial n) 
     (if (= n 0)
         1
         (* n (factorial factorial (- n 1)))))

Now pass in the initial argument

x))

(lambda (x)
  (lambda (f n) (f f n))
     (lambda (factorial n)
         (if (= n 0)
              1
              (* n factorial factorial (- n 1)))))
  x))

Downloads:

Download: y-comb.scm 157 B

Please login or Click Here to register for downloads

Y-combinator by Dan Lynch
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Based on a work at www.3daet.com
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.3daet.com