What is currying? an aha! moment

Since it really is an aha! moment, the best I can do is tell you what led me to it, and hope that helps.

There is a difference between partial application and currying that most experts ignore, because they already understand, but they lie in wait ready to tell you that you have it all wrong.

And you won’t understand because the concepts are >thatI’ll start with Haskell syntax for the type of a function that takes two integers and returns one.

Integer -> Integer -> Integer

in C that would be

int (*T)(int , int )

Now. what about a function that takes an int and returns a function
that takes an int and returns an int?

(using cdecl syntax)
declare T as function (int) returning pointer to function (int) returning int

int (*T(int ))(int )

or, in Haskell
Integer -> Integer -> Integer

Wait.

Shouldn’t those have different types in Haskell? They look really much more different in C !

I can’t tell the difference in Haskell between a function that takes two ints and returns an int, and a function that takes one int and returns a function that takes one int and returns an int.

Yes.

Exactly.

AHA!

a -> b -> c

a function that takes an a and returns a function that maps b to c, or a function that takes an a and a b and returns a c. They are entirely equivalent.

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