Why lambda Is So Important
The ability to pass around functions as if they were just plain old pieces of data is incredibly valuable. Once you get used to doing this, you open up all kinds of conceptual possibilities in the design of your programs. Eventually, your programs will start looking very different from programs in more (dare I say) pedestrian languages, such as Java or C. The name for the style of programming that relies heavily on passing functions as values is called higher-order functional programming. We will look at this style in more detail in Chapter 14.
An even more important reason why Lispers go gaga over lambda is that, as it turns out, in a purely mathematical sense, lambda is actually the only Lisp command there is!
Recall ...
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