Customer Reviews

Introduction to Combinators and (lambda) Calculus (London Mathematical Society Student Texts)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a very well-written introductory textbook on combinatory logic and lambda-calculus, both of which are the most essntial core of modern functional programming languages such as Haskell, Standard ML, CAML, etc.

This book covers typed lambda-calculi/combinatory logic as well as type-free ones.

Many useful and understandable examples/counter-examples are given when theorems or definitions of notions must be rather abstract and general.
Those (especially counter-)examples avoid readers from falling into pitfalls of abstract notions for novices of math logic.

It is often the case that several distinct notions seem to be equivalent for novices. This is a typical pitfall of abstractness, but clear counter-examples are carefully given just at such pitfalls so that novices of lambda-calculus/combinatory logic can prevent to fall down into confusion.

Proofs in this charming textbook are very easily followable.

Owing to various helpful examples and/or counter-examples, readers will not lose their intuition even in front of such logical exactness and/or very dry abstractness.

Needless to say, this book is imperative for students of lambda-calculus, combinatory logic, type theory, or constructive math (all of these are fields of math logic), because this book gives very self-contained accounts on core parts of those fields.

The value of this beautiful book is not limitted within such purely academic math logic fields, though.

This beautiful book is also a must for practical programmers of functional languages as listed above, because this book very well tells practitioners about the scientific theory behind their working tools, i.e. functional programming languages.

Then, programmers can become to believe that science is really useful in software development, which is often regarded as an engineering field where academic pure science does not give any help.

If you are a functional programmer, you should have a copy!
(If you are a students on topics of this book, you MUST, too, of course!)