Beta reduction

Revision as of 16:49, 29 January 2007 by MathematicalOrchid (Talk | contribs)

A beta reduction (also written β reduction) is basically where you actually apply a lambda function to an expression to generate a result.

For example, suppose we have

(\x y -> 2*x*x + y) 7

If we now replace every occurance of

x

with 7, we arrive at

\y -> 2*7*7 + y

We have thus performed a beta reduction.