Z Combinator

Version: 0.1.0 Master build:

This library provides a utility function to support the creation of a self referencing anonymous functions. It can be installed in whichever way you prefer, but I recommend NPM.

The Z Combinator is the same, in principle, as the Y Combinator except it works in languages with applicative (eager) order of execution (arguments are evaluated before the function call) just like JavaScript.

For more information about the Z Combinator please read Douglas Crockford's "The Little JavaScripter".

Basic usage

var z = require('z-combinator');

// Factorial
var factorial = z(function(fn) {
    return function(n) {
        return 2 >= n ? n : n * fn(n - 1);
    }
});

factorial(2) // => 2
factorial(3) // => 6
factorial(4) // => 24
factorial(5) // => 120

Contributing

I accept contributions to the source via Pull Request, but passing unit tests must be included before it will be considered for merge.

$ make install
$ make tests

If you have Vagrant installed, you can build the dev environment to assist development. The repository will be mounted in /srv.

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-generic x86_64)
$ cd /srv

License

The content of this library is released under the MIT License by Andrew Lawson. You can find a copy of this license at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit or in LICENSE