What is a Y-combinator?

Question

How do combinators work? What are they good for? Are they useful in procedural languages?

Answer 1

The Y-combinator is a lambda calculus function that allows you to implement recursion. This is important since in the pure lambda calculus, functions don’t have names and in order to implement recursive functions you need a function name to do the recursive calls.

The Y combinator is essentially an infinite while that allows you to emulate recursivity.