[bitc-dev] White space

[wren ng thornton]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> 2010/8/8 Kristopher Micinski krismicinski at gmail.com
>>  Did you mean we might later introduce currying syntax? Currying is at the
>> core of functional languages, I don't think it should be removed.
> 
> Since it isn't there now, it's not a question of removing it. And currying
> is *not* at the core of functional languages; functional composition is.
> There are many fine ways to provide that without adopting currying as the
> syntax.

Do you mean the literal sense of composing functions (ala (.) in 
Haskell), or do you mean composition of functionality more generally?

If the former, does BitC have a special (efficient, non-allocating,...) 
way of dealing with other common combinators like 'flip', K, W, S,...? 
One of the major benefits of functional programming from a practical 
perspective is that we can define and use these combinators in order to 
clean up API integration issues. Even without full support for HOFs, 
just providing the half-dozen basic combinators significantly reduces 
coding boilerplate in my experience. If you can already handle B 
specially, the others should be easy to do too.

-- 
Live well,
~wren