Lambda Calculus and Programming Languages
As pointed out by Peter Landin's 1965 paper A Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation, sequential procedural programming languages can be understood in terms of the lambda calculus, which provides the basic mechanisms for procedural abstraction and procedure (subprogram) application.
Lambda calculus reifies "functions" and makes them first-class objects, which raises implementation complexity when it is implemented.
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