Re^2: Specializing Functions with Currying

[zby]

I find your example simpler than the original. But I need to object the dismissal of the verb 'currying' as it is a very basic vocabulary from Computing Science, much more basic than 'closure'.

[diotalevi]

Ok, well my understanding of computer science is limited. In perl we implement currying with anonymous function and as such, talk about anonymous functions much more often than currying. What part of currying in perl am I not understooding when I say "anonymous function?" Also, what part of language/implementation independent currying am I not understanding when I think of an anonymous function in perl?

I changed my term from "closure" to "anonymous function" because while closures are anonymous functions, they go slightly farther by having a lexical environment and anonymous functions don't necessarily have that.

[jryan]

"Currying" does not mean "using an anonymous function", it means "partial application of function arguments." It's kind of like saying "I know that I'm going to call this function with these first few arguments, so let me half-call it now so that I don't have to worry about them later." Perl's OO system sort of has transparent currying aspect to it. Each method call is just a function call automatically curried with one argument (the object that the method was called upon) and then called. For a more concrete application of currying, you could check out this old node by mirod.

[diotalevi]

Yes... I see that and still keep thinking "boy, this is pretty normal perl stuff". find( sub { wanted( @my_args, @_ ) }, ... ) is already easy to use and I don't see the utility in going out of the way to inject extra obfuscatory language just to describe it.