On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> wrote: > But in truth, if I could figure out how to re-extract multi-argument > procedures at the implementation level easily enough, I'ld probably > revert to single argument procedures at this point.
Just a dumb question: why is auto-currying so important? As you outlined previously, allowing one to pass less (or more) arguments to a function than one would "naively" expect from reading its definition is nothing more than a comfort feature that saves some typing. That comfort feature uses up syntactic design space that becomes unavailable for other, arguably more important ones like optional arguments. My uneducated guess is that the latter is way more useful in a microkernel than currying. Having to write these lambdas explicitly provides the exact same functionality, arguably with better auditability to boot (because the additional closures are explicitly visible in the source code). Also worth mentioning is that in OCaml, curry notation introduces some typing shenanigans that quite squarely violate the principle of least astonishment, see http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/faq/core.en.html#eta-expansion (although whether that particular problem also occurs in BitC's type system is miles beyond my understanding). -- Dominique Quatravaux +41 79 609 40 72 _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
