michael rice <nowg...@yahoo.com> writes: > This is from Learn You A Haskell: > > ========== > > "Curried functions > > Every function in Haskell officially only takes one > parameter. So how is it possible that we defined and used > several functions that take more than one parameter so far? > Well, it's a clever trick! All the functions that accepted > several parameters so far have been curried functions. What > does that mean? You'll understand it best on an example. > Let's take our good friend, the max function. It looks like > it takes two parameters and returns the one that's bigger. > Doing max 4 5 first creates a function that takes a > parameter and returns either 4 or that parameter, depending > on which is bigger. Then, 5 IS APPLIED TO THAT FUNCTION and > that function produces our desired result. > > What really happens when we do multThree 3 5 9 or > ((multThree 3) 5) 9? First, 3 is applied to multThree, > because they're separated by a space. That creates a > function that takes one parameter and returns a function. So > then 5 IS APPLIED TO THAT, which creates a function that > will take a parameter and multiply it by 15. 9 IS APPLIED TO > THAT FUNCTION and the result is 135 or something." > > ======= > > The language (in CAPS) in the above two paragraphs seems to > be backwards.
It is. "5 is applied to that function" should be "5 is supplied to that function" (or that function is applied to 5) and so on. It's a fairly common error in writing this sort of thing¹, and given that the title "Learn You A Haskell" is totally ungrammatical, hardly seems surprising. > In the first paragraph, since functions are > conventionally "applied" to parameters shouldn't it read > something like THE PARTIALLY APPLIED FUNCTION IS THEN > APPLIED TO the 5? Or is the terminology different for > Haskell, No, but Haskell does have a lot of non-native users of English among its users. [1] A pet peeve of mine is "x supports y" being used backwards (as in "our application supports windows Vista", which would only make sense if it were something like a system tool that stopped Vista crashing. -- Jón Fairbairn jon.fairba...@cl.cam.ac.uk http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2009-01-31) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe