"Lambda Calculus and Functional Programming"
Manoj Pageni 2006
Abstract
Functional programming promotes the view of programming as a mathematical activity and provides more abstract reasoning about programs. A program in a functional langauge is just a single function. The development of functional programming had been greatly influenced by lambda-calculus. Lambda-calculus is a formal system designed to investigate function definition, function application, and recursion. It is a simple langauge with few constructs and simple semantics, but it is powerful enough to express all computable functions. In this thesis, we explore various aspects of lambda-calculus and its relation to programming languages, in particular functional programming, and show how lambda-calculus maps to functional programming.