Function Currying

[Bill Baxter]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Hasan Aljudy wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> Brad Roberts wrote:
>>
>>> The net is a truly wonderful resource:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curried_function
>>
>>
> Although apparently confusion over what's "currying" and what's "partial 
> function evaluation" abounds.

And I am no exception -- what I should have said was "partial function 
/application/".  At least in this case, there's no actual evaluating 
going on.

Anyway I'm mostly aware of this distinction between currying and partial 
application because of a big debate on the python mailing list when 
someone proposed a standard "currying" library, that was basically a 
Python version of Walter's "curry" functions.  The currying proposal 
eventually got it's name changed to "partial function application 
proposal" because, as was pointed out, it wasn't currying.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0309/

It is now in python 2.5 as the function called "partial()" in the module 
functools.


--bb