Currying Wrapup

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From the course by University of Washington

Programming Languages, Part A

1030 ratings

University of Washington

Programming Languages, Part A

1030 ratings

This course is an introduction to the basic concepts of programming languages, with a strong emphasis on functional programming. The course uses the languages ML, Racket, and Ruby as vehicles for teaching the concepts, but the real intent is to teach enough about how any language “fits together” to make you more effective programming in any language -- and in learning new ones. This course is neither particularly theoretical nor just about programming specifics -- it will give you a framework for understanding how to use language constructs effectively and how to design correct and elegant programs. By using different languages, you will learn to think more deeply than in terms of the particular syntax of one language. The emphasis on functional programming is essential for learning how to write robust, reusable, composable, and elegant programs. Indeed, many of the most important ideas in modern languages have their roots in functional programming. Get ready to learn a fresh and beautiful way to look at software and how to have fun building it. The course assumes some prior experience with programming, as described in more detail in the first module. The course is divided into three Coursera courses: Part A, Part B, and Part C. As explained in more detail in the first module of Part A, the overall course is a substantial amount of challenging material, so the three-part format provides two intermediate milestones and opportunities for a pause before continuing. The three parts are designed to be completed in order and set up to motivate you to continue through to the end of Part C. The three parts are not quite equal in length: Part A is almost as substantial as Part B and Part C combined. Week 1 of Part A has a more detailed list of topics for all three parts of the course, but it is expected that most course participants will not (yet!) know what all these topics mean.

From the lesson

Section 3 and Homework 3 -- and Course Motivation

This section is all about higher-order functions -- the feature that gives functional programming much of its expressiveness and elegance -- and its name! As usual, the first reading below introduces you to the section, but it will make more sense once you dive in to the lectures. Also be sure not to miss the material on course motivation that we have put in a "lesson" between the other videos for this week and the homework assignment. The material is "optional" in the sense that it is not needed for the homeworks or next week's exam, but it is still very highly encouraged to better understand why the course (including Parts B and C) covers what it does and, hopefully, will change the way you look at software forever.

Meet the Instructors

Dan Grossman
Professor
Computer Science & Engineering

[MUSIC] There are just a couple more topics I want to cover with currying, and

the first is that sometimes the function you want to call isn't organized the way

you might wish it were. Maybe you want to curry function and it's

a tupled function, or you want a tupled function and it's a curried function.

Or maybe you want to use partial application but not with the first few

arguments. Maybe with the later arguments and you

can't do that. Given a curried function, you have to

pass the first argument to it. But what we could do is use our idea of

combining functions to, once and for all, write very generic, very reusable

functions like we did with function composition, that let us change one kind

of function into another. So let me motivate that with a short

example. We've seen this example before where I

wanted to take this function range, which takes two numbers, i and j and returns a

list with all the numbers from i up to j, use that to create a helper function

countup that just goes from one to the number and then use that A countup

function. So this code as written, will not work.

And that's because this version of range, is tupled. It takes a pair.

And here I tried to use partial application.

Now of course, I could work around this, or I could change range, but there's a

very general thing I could do, which is to take a, write a function that takes a

function expecting a pair and return the same function in curried form.

So it's basically takes a function and curries it.

So what if I did this, I can take this function f and then I would return a

function that takes 2 arguments in curried form.

And then calls f with the pair because f expects a pair but curry of f will return

a two argument curried function. And now, down here, for count up, I could

just, and still call, instead call, curry of range.

And this, will now work. So that's pretty neat, let me clean it up

a little bit more, just by using the syntactic sugar we've seen before.

I could of just written it like this. That's curry and at the call site, these

parenthesis, are optional. We can go the other diretion as well.

If we add a curry'ed function but we wanted to pass it a tuple and that could

actually be useful, if you are composing functions, or chaining them together.

We could take 2. We, we we could take f, and x,y and return a function, that would

look like this. So now when you call uncurry, with some

functions foo you would get back a function that expected a pair and then

called f with 2 arguments in curried form, so that's pretty neat.

let me quickly show you the types of curry and uncurry.

They're very generic and I will leave you to puzzle over them, but I want to point

out one very neat thing. There is a very deep connection to logic

here, you're not responsible for this, but if you have studied logic Read these

as logical formulas where the star is and, and the arrow is implies.

And you'll see that these are actually true logical formulas and that hints that

there's actually a very deep connection, a very mathematical connection between

tuppling and currying. And I'm going to leave that as a

mysterious statement for you. one other thing I wanted to show you that

also has these logical formulas. Once you look at their type, is switching

the arguments of curried functions. So if you had a 2 argument curried

function and you wanted to partially apply it to the first argument, or to the

first argument instead of the first, you couldn't do that unless you took that

function and passed it to this function first instead.

So, f takes two curried arguments, but other curried of f will just take the

arguments in the opposite order. It takes an x and a y and then it calls f

with y and x and we've seen before there's syntactic sugar for this. We

could just write it, that way. Okay, so just more fun playing around

with combining functions. Hopefully I've shown you that this thing

is at least a little bit useful. And functional programmers do often

program with these things, in order to get things elegant, and pretty, and

arranged just how they want. So, that was one topic I wanted to

discuss. The other, is people often want to know,

isn't currying really slow? If I want to create all these closures to call a

function. And it turns out, that it depends, and

that's up to the language implementation. And language implementations can actually

make curried functions very efficient. So in general, both calling a function

with a tupple, and calling a function via currying with multiple arguments.

These are plenty fast. These are constant time operations.

You should program in a way, that, makes your code elegant, short, concise, and

correct. Alright.

Well then maybe you might want to know which is, is faster.

This is not part of the language definition.

It will depend on the language implementation.

And it turns out that the implementation of SML that we are using, the SML New

Jersey compiler, does faster with tupling than with currying.

So kind were in fact were be a bit slower for the function calling times and times

and times of time for performance critical application where it actually

matters, I should point out this is actually not necessarily the case, in

fact most of their functional programming language implementations out there today

OCaml Fsharp Haskell to better with currying, than with.

Coupling. Now, the optimizer might do very well

with both of them. But in those other languages, we tell

performance conscious programmers, use currying.

It'll work just fine. If you use partial application, which is

something up to callers. That might be a little bit slower.

But in languages where currying is always the norm, we tell programmers even when

they're learning to program, oh it's just the 3-argument function.

And the same way I lied to you at first and told you that tuple's version was a

3-argument function and then went back and told you the truth.

That's what these other languages do with currying.

Currying is the default. Almost everything is curried and you only

tuple things in those situations where

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