Illuminating Lambdas

This month, Richard Thomson will give us an explanation of lambda expressions and how they work.

The C++11 standard introduced "lambda expressions" to the C++ language. The C++14, C++17 and C++20 standards have all generalized lambda expressions beyond their predecessors. Cppreference.com defines a lambda expression as "constructs a closure: an unnamed function object capable of capturing variables in scope." What exactly does this mean in more familiar terms? It's also been said that lambda expressions are "syntactic sugar for function objects". Why do people say that and what do they mean by it?

In this presentation, we'll embrace the notion of "syntactic sugar" by showing the explicit function objects you would have written in C++98 that correspond to lambda expressions in C++11 and beyond. We'll start with the simplest lambda expressions and progress through more complicated variations.

This will be an online meeting, so drinks and snacks are up to you!