A bit of fun with the Y combinator

[Millies, Sebastian]

nice. but I think the “simplification” you’re using is cheating.
You’re not allowed to use “this” references (as you do in the
interface SelfApplicable).


n  Sebastian

From: Samuel Dennis Borlongan [mailto:srborlongan at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:40 AM
To: Millies, Sebastian
Cc: lambda-dev at openjdk.java.net
Subject: Re: A bit of fun with the Y combinator

I've made a variant:
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator#Java
Please note that Y::main's combinator and fixedPoint variables are actually unneeded; they only serve as a way to use the Y combinator without making the coder's eyes bleed (more).
[code snipped]

Samuel Dennis R. Borlongan

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Millies, Sebastian <Sebastian.Millies at softwareag.com<mailto:Sebastian.Millies at softwareag.com>> wrote:
Hello there,

many people seem to enjoy coding the Y combinator in Java. There are examples
in Java 7 (e. g. [1] and [2]) which I decided to try and port to Java 8. The popular
application is to compute the factorial function.

I’ll show my first solution in a minute. The code really does work: There are no
variables, no names assigned to any function, only lambda expressions and parameters.
And yet, we can recursively compute the factorial of arbitrary integers.

Here’s the puzzle for you: I have not been able to “generify” the thing, i. e.
replace all references to “int” in the Y combinator with a suitable type parameter.
I would always get type incompatibilities. And remember: No named methods or
variables are allowed. (e. g. the Java 7 code in [2] violates that condition.)

Note that there are a few casts even in the working solution. Why are they necessary?
It would be nice to get rid of them.

Best Regards,
Sebastian

[1] http://www.righto.com/2009/03/y-combinator-in-arc-and-java.html
[2] https://gist.github.com/jonbodner/2571928

Code follows
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[code snipped]


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