On Mar 2, 11:05 pm, Adam Atlas wrote:

I once proposed (as far as I can tell) the exact same thing. Here's   the discussion that took place --http://markmail.org/message/aa22tnx2vog3rnin

I still like the idea, but it doesn't appear to be very popular.

Thank you, at least I feel a little less foolish now. I did try to search for such a proposal, but it's hard to know what search terms to use. To be honest I don't think it's generally useful enough to merit a change to the language, but somehow the idea floated into my head and it just seemed so *neat* that I had to tell somebody. It may be that it just appeals to my sense of aesthetics.

Haskell has this too, perhaps even more extreme: there's not really such a thing in Haskell as a function of N arguments (N > 1). "f a b = ..." defines a function f of one argument a which returns another function ("f a") of one argument b. And so on. That doesn't mean we need to copy this idea in Python. On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

Weeble wrote:

...

I don't think it's generally useful enough to merit a change to the language, but somehow the idea floated into my head and it just seemed so *neat* that I had to tell somebody.

The designers of at least one other language seem to think it's neat, too. Scheme has an exactly analogous construct:

 (define ((f x) y)    ...)

which is shorthand for

 (define f    (lambda (x)      (lambda (y) ...)))

[The *really* neat thing about the Scheme version is the way it just naturally falls out of the macro expansion of 'define' in terms of 'lambda' -- so it's not really a separate language feature at all!]

-- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Weeble wrote:

Thank you, at least I feel a little less foolish now. I did try to search for such a proposal, but it's hard to know what search terms to use. To be honest I don't think it's generally useful enough to merit a change to the language, but somehow the idea floated into my head and it just seemed so *neat* that I had to tell somebody. It may be that it just appeals to my sense of aesthetics.

If it makes you feel better, you can still get almost all of the way there with decorators, and it's even "officially" documented: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecoratorLibrary#Pseudo-currying -- Cheers, Leif