The Many Flavors of Curry

August 31st, 2009

Many functional languages have this nifty feature called ‘currying’ or ‘curried functions’. The name comes from the logician Haskell Curry (son of Samuel Silas Curry — someone please hook me up with wherever they are getting these names!), for whom the Haskell programming language is also named. Currying is a technique for making partial applications of functions first class objects in an intuitive way.

Types and Type Theory (part 2)

August 24th, 2009

In my previous post I mentioned different ways in which programming languages (and programmers) make use of types and type theory. In my next post I would like to describe the formal system which underlies almost all typed programming languages, the “simply-typed lambda calculus.” But before I get to that, I need to explain the (untyped) lambda calculus, its history, motivation, and functionality.

This is Part 2 in a multi-part series on the subject of Types and Type Theory.