On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 5:32 AM, Tyler Compton <xavi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't pretend to be proficient in this realm of functional programming, > but I would be very surprised if this is valuable in a language like Go > that can and does hold state. In functional languages, it is often used as a way to "configure" a function. I.e., the function is defined as let f conf x = ... where 'f' is the function name, 'conf' a parameter of configuration and 'x' the "real" argument to the function. Now, partial application such a (f c) for some configuration 'c', yields another function which has been configured, or specialized, to the particular use case. Usually it allows you to define a generic function and then specialize it in some context by "plugging in" a configuration. The configuration is often a constant value which means the compiler will typically constant-propagate that value into the closure. Many functional compilers understand that closures with static data can be eliminated at compile time by replacing them with a normal function. In other words, you have a generic variant of your function, but when run it is specialized and instantiated into an optimized variant. You *can* get the same with a function such as 'f(conf, x)' but in this case, the compiler usually has some more work to do before it can apply the above transformation. -- J. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
