The lambda calculus is a formal mathematical system
devised by Alonzo Church to investigate
functions, function application and recursion.
It has influenced many programming languages but
none more so than the functional programming languages.
Lisp was the first of these although only the "pure" Lisp sublanguage
can be called a true functional language.
Haskell, Miranda and ML are more recent examples.
Lambda calculus also provides the meta-language for
formal definitions in
It has a good claim to be the prototype programming language.
© L. Allison, Dept. of Computer Science, Monash University