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Concept
Church encoding
Summary
In mathematics, Church encoding is a means of representing data and operators in the lambda calculus. The Church numerals are a representation of the natural numbers using lambda notation. The method is named for Alonzo Church, who first encoded data in the lambda calculus this way.
Terms that are usually considered primitive in other notations (such as integers, booleans, pairs, lists, and tagged unions) are mapped to higher-order functions under Church encoding. The Church-Turing thesis asserts that any computable operator (and its operands) can be represented under Church encoding. In the untyped lambda calculus the only primitive data type is the function.
A straightforward implementation of Church encoding slows some access operations from to , where is the size of the data structure, making Church encoding impractical. Research has shown that this can be addressed by targeted optimizations, but most functional programming languages instead expand their intermediate representations to contain algebraic data types. Nonetheless Church encoding is often used in theoretical arguments, as it is a natural representation for partial evaluation and theorem proving. Operations can be typed using higher-ranked types, and primitive recursion is easily accessible. The assumption that functions are the only primitive data types streamlines many proofs.
Church encoding is complete but only representationally. Additional functions are needed to translate the representation into common data types, for display to people. It is not possible in general to decide if two functions are extensionally equal due to the undecidability of equivalence from Church's theorem. The translation may apply the function in some way to retrieve the value it represents, or look up its value as a literal lambda term. Lambda calculus is usually interpreted as using intensional equality. There are potential problems with the interpretation of results because of the difference between the intensional and extensional definition of equality.
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