Re: l, the ultimate curry that is not curry

[Al Petrofsky <al@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: sebastian.egner@xxxxxxxxxxx

> you can find examples where it is an advantage to drop the 
> actual names of the variables, especially if they are longer.
> The break even point comes when 
> 
>    Sum(n[i] : i in {1..r}) >= r, 
> 
> where n[i] is the number of characters in the name of the 
> i-th parameter of the result, for i in {1..r}. In other
> words, the 'curry'-notation is shorter when there is at
> least one variable name with more than one character.
> For example,
> 
>      (curry cons-stream <> stream)
> <=>  (l (object stream) (cons-stream object stream))

Actually, that would be:

       (curry cons-stream <> stream)
  <=>  (l (object) (cons-stream object stream))

But if it is not important to give the argument a descriptive name in
the curry version, then it is not important in the lambda version
either, so we have:

       (curry cons-stream <> stream)
  <=>  (l (x) (cons-stream x stream))

As you can see, curry's character count advantage is negligible (one
character per "<>").

-al

P.S. The procedural implementation of curry would choke on this
example, if we assume the usual definition of cons-stream (a macro
that delays its second argument).