Can someone explain....

[gbaughma]

Can someone explain, in simple terms... a lambda expression?

For some stupid reason, I can't wrap my brain around it.


Just my $.02

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

 

[xwb]

It is just an anonymous function (no name) which captures the values or references in the scope in which they are defined.

Name comes from lambda calculus introduced in the 1930s. It has been available in LISP since 1964 so this is not some fancy new concept. Many of the examples you see on the internet are very bad examples of using lambdas. Very often you can just declare functions instead of using lambdas in those examples.