From: Dido Sevilla Date: 2006-05-19T12:31:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Partial functions? On 5/18/06, Edgardo Hames wrote: > I think partial functions is unapropriate name. The first thing I > thought of when I read the subject of this email was the mathematical > concept of it[0]. > Exactly. Partial functions are another term for what some references call 'recursively enumerable' functions, meaning a function that can be computed by some Turing machine. I believe the appropriate term is 'Curried functions', from the logician who first proposed them, someone called Haskell Curry (yes, *that* Haskell). I've been programming in Ocaml too, and there it seems that curried functions are extremely useful. In Ocaml most often I've used it to call a function with several arguments multiple times with only a few arguments changing between calls, or for passing a function with say 4 arguments to an HOF that expects a function with only one, I create a curried function that keeps 3 of the 4 arguments fixed and pass that. Since it is indeed possible to program in the functional style in Ruby, I could imagine that the technique would be just as usable.