kamin@uiucdcs.UUCP (12/14/84)
I am also curious about the omission of "bu", and (forgive me) couldn't understand Baden's "response." It does not appear that "bu" was omitted in favor of a more general currying function - at least I can't find any in the manual. (And obviously such a function can't be user-defined, since it is a functional.) I'd just like to re-submit this question. By the way, I would like some clarification on the comment made by jnw, and endorsed by Baden, on a "more general" currying function. The idea is that a function f may have a pair of arguments <x,y>, and you want to obtain, for fixed x0, a function F such that F:y = f:<x0,y>. This might be generalized to f having more than two arguments, but this is quite a different thing: for fixed x1,...,xn, find F such that F:<y1,...,ym> = f:<x1,...,xn,y1,...,ym>. This is not a "generalization" of bu in the sense that bu is a special case, because in the two argument case, we would have F:<y> = f:<x0,y>, and <y> is not the same as y. A further generalization is to allow some subset of the arguments to be fixed, but this would be a notational nightmare (this kind of thing can be done nicely only by allowing user-defined functionals). So I would like to know what Wilson and Baden have in mind. Sam Kamin (uiucdcs!kamin) C.S. Dept. U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign