anonymous-recursion

In the book The little schemer , we find this function that only supports lists with length smaller than or equal to 1 : (((lambda (mk-length) ; A. (mk-length mk-length)) (lambda (mk-length) (lambda (l) (cond ((null? l ) 0) (else (add1 ((mk-length eternity ) (cdr l)))))))) '(1)) I want to study step by step, and want to write the similar function that supports only lists of length smaller than or equal to 2 . Please, don't answer this question by offering code like: (((lambda (mk-length) ; B. (mk-length mk-length)) (lambda (mk-length) (lambda (l) (cond ((null? l) 0 ) (else (add1((mk-length mk

I'm in a Scheme class and I was curious about writing a recursive function without using define. The main problem, of course, is that you cannot call a function within itself if it doesn't have a name. I did find this example: It's a factorial generator using only lambda. ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (fact-gen) (lambda (n) (if (zero? n) 1 (* n ((fact-gen fact-gen) (sub1 n))))))) But I can't even make sense of the first call, (lambda (x) (x x)): What exactly does that do? And where do you input the value you want to get the factorial of? This is not for the class, this is just out of curiosity.