Lambda, Lambda, Lambda - Uncovering the Mystery Behind Lambda Expressions

Introduction

At first glance, a lambda expression looks like something your professor may have written on the blackboard in calculus class, but in reality, it is "syntactic sugar" built into the C# language over delegates.  In this article, we will begin to explore the nuances of lambda expressions by seeing how they they relate to delegates and how they can be used to implement a popular mathematical formula, the quadratic equation.

What is a delegate?

A delegate is nothing more than a function pointer in C#.  Unlike the function that sits in your C# class,  a delegate can be passed around like any other variable or property.  Why would you want to pass around a function?  The advantage of passing around a function, is that you can dynamically have it execute wherever you want inside of your code.  Jeremy Miller just wrote a great article in MSDN (Oct 2009) on how you can use lamdbas (a.k.a. delegates)  for various tasks such as helping you reduce code duplication, passing expressions into filters, generating calls from a separate thread into your UI thread, and more.  Delegates have opened C# up to the world of functional programming, so we .NET programmers now have at our disposal the richness of object-oriented mechanisms along with the power of functional constructs.

Delegates describe the signature of the function you want to pass around your program.  In the case of the quadratic formula, we need to pass in 3 parameters to produce our resulting roots. The delegate for a quadratic looks something like this:

delegate double QuadraticDelegate(double a, double b, double c);

Note that the delegate differs from an actual function in that you need to "new up" a delegate instance and give it a function.  The function can either take the form of an existing method in your class, or it can be an anonymous method.   An anonymous method defines the delegate without requiring an existing method.  In an anonymous method, you simply define the implementation when you are constructing the delegate instance.

In our first attempt at implementing the quadratic formula, we use 3 anonymous methods.  The first anonymous method calculates the discriminant of the quadratic formula.  The discriminant is then used by the quadratic formula anonymous methods to calculate the two roots of the equation.  Note that none of the delegates actually implement the formula, they just create the implementations needed to run against parameters a,b, and c.  Implementing the delegate is performed the same way you would call any other method, by passing values to the delegate.

Listing 1 - Implementing the quadratic formula with anonymous methods

The first 3 double parameters in the Func template are for the 3 doubles passed into the function.  The last double parameter is the return value type.  Microsoft would have had to create a different Func template for varying number of parameters, so I was curious at what point they stopped creating Func<T> methods.  After all there could be an infinite number of Func<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, ...Result>.  The MSDN documentation and intellisense shows a maximum of 4, so I guess my sample came close to hitting the limit.  Anyway, below are the results of all three methods of producing the quadratic, and as expected all produce equivalent results .


Figure 1 - Results of running all three delegate methods

Conclusion 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with lambda expressions, but hopefully this article helps clarify what a lambda expression is used for in C#.  Lambda expressions start to get more interesting when you start to take advantage of the closure principle or when you use lambdas with powerful technologies such as LINQ.  In the meantime, don't  be afraid to delegate your knowledge to your programming tasks and harness the power of lambda in C# and .NET.