partial application

Cagdas Ozgenc co19@cornell.edu
Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:47:58 +0200


 Koen Claessen contributed:

> Somehow I do not think that Cagdas was talking about
> evaluation order at all. I think he referred to the
> following: Suppose I have a function f which is defined to
> have 3 arguments:


That's right. I was thinking of the following syntax. I orginally had the
idea for C++, where you can't do partial application at all.

f x y z=...

f # 3 4

omitting the first parameter, and

f * 3 4

using the default value for the first argument. In C++ you can specify
default values. One needs to distinguish whether you are doing partial
application or counting on the default value. Of course this doesn't apply
to Haskell.

However, I still wonder whether there is a technical difficulty why it is
not implemented!

Thanks for your comments.