On 16/05/2011 9:54 AM, Graydon Hoare wrote:
My counterargument is simple and it's what I meant above by binder2nd covering all cases: the odds against an *independently written* 5-arg function taking the exact same 5 args (not 4, not 6, and not 5 in some other order) are ... low. That as N increases from 1 the odds against a serendipitous match between any two N-ary functions and argument tuples matching up decreases geometrically. So much so that beyond "binary function" is just never even *happens*, serendipitously, in the field.
As a further counterexample: N-arg functions in *ML* don't even always wind up encoded as N-tuples. They very commonly write in curried form so that you have (X -> Y -> Z) rather than (X*Y) -> Z. And even this little wrinkle tends to defeat parsimonious combinations. It gets worse as soon as you add mutability. And we have 4 or more kinds of pointer...
-Graydon _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
