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Meh, the Y combinator is a funny hack. A lot of people waffle on about it because they're blown away by how crazy untyped lambda calculus is. There are all kinds of ways to introduce recursion into a language, though. It's simply interesting that you might get it on accident in a language will as little restriction as UTLC.


Oh don't worry, you can make a Y combinator in a typed lambda calculus too, it's just a little more involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Type_for...


Depends on the type theory. You need recursive types. Or you can just posit fix.




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