Implementing recursive lambda with MethodHandle

[Neal Gafter]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote:

>  On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:
>> > That is definitely not the idea of this JSR.  We are not "eliminating"
>> the
>> > need for anonymous inner classes.  We are providing a good alternative
>> for a
>> > huge number of use cases.  These recursive functions are a vanishingly
>> small
>> > fraction of the identified use cases.
>> >
>>
>> Neal, I think Josh was saying the JSR is to eliminate the anonymous
>> class syntax for lambdas -- not eliminate the syntax in general.
>
>
> Exactly so.
>

Well, Java doesn't have any "lambdas" today, so to make sense of this we'd
have to refer to what other languages call lambda.  Doing so, we find a
clear answer to the question of what it means for a lambda to be recursive,
and how the recursion is expressed.