Re:What is the advantage of currying?
by groue on Saturday February 02, 2013 @11:05AM
(#5156278)
Another perspective of currying, from a guy that is not versed in functional programming.
I have written an expression evaluation engine whose internal implementation only manipulates functions that have a single argument. Merely value transformers.
It used to only interpret expressions like `f(x)`, `g(f(x))`. Later, functions were able to return other functions, and `f(x)(y)` was allowed. However, this last expression really looks like it would be better written `f(x,y)`. Why force the user to use a convoluted curried syntax such as `f(x)(y)` for his two-parameter function?
So the `f(x,y)` form has been added as a mere syntactic sugar. However the guts of the engine are still made of single-argument functions. That can get curried.
So currying is not only a tool for the end-user. It's also a tool for the language implementor :-)
I have written an expression evaluation engine whose internal implementation only manipulates functions that have a single argument. Merely value transformers.
It used to only interpret expressions like `f(x)`, `g(f(x))`. Later, functions were able to return other functions, and `f(x)(y)` was allowed. However, this last expression really looks like it would be better written `f(x,y)`. Why force the user to use a convoluted curried syntax such as `f(x)(y)` for his two-parameter function?
So the `f(x,y)` form has been added as a mere syntactic sugar. However the guts of the engine are still made of single-argument functions. That can get curried.
So currying is not only a tool for the end-user. It's also a tool for the language implementor :-)