/lambdaList

A package that implements an R translation of Steve Losh's List Out of Lambda.

Primary LanguageRGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

An R Translation of List Out of Lambda

This package translates Steve Losh's amazing article, List Out of Lambda into R. Like the original article, it builds lists using only functions and then expands on these "objects" with a variety of functional programming tools. As far as the latter are concerned, the package draws considerably from Hadley Wickham's purrr package. It can be mostly thought of as a thought experiment, since it does not meet performance or usability standards of traditional R objects.

Then again, that's not really the point either. To quote Steve,

Remember: the point is not to create something that runs well on a physical computer. Instead of thinking about how to make a particular combination of transistors and circuits have the right voltages, think about “computing” in the beautiful, perfect, abstract sense.

An explanation of the functional lists and their surprising applications can be found here.

Installation

Again, this package is only an exercise. But that doesn't mean that it isn't fun to play with. If you'd like to try it out, run:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github('michaelquinn32/lambdaList')