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Function arity with currying and call-by-push-valueIn λ-calculus, all functions are unary, and n-ary functions are encoded through currying. But knowing the arity of a function can be useful for optimization — a curried function starts computing only after applying it to at least N arguments, and this N can be useful to know.
Below I explain the details. Applications of arity: But function arity is a tricky concept in λ-calculus. For instance, id should be unary, Haskell's ($) is binary, but ($) is defined as equal to id: ($) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b So, a notion of arity seems tricky, and one of my colleague keeps repeating it's a bad idea. Today, while reading a paper using CBPV (Hammer et al. 2014), I got a hunch that the call-by-push-value (CBPV) λ-calculus seems to allow for a natural notion of arity. But Googling does not find this spelled out anywhere, maybe because CBPV seems typically used in theoretical contexts. I'm So, why should CBPV help? (1) It distinguishes values (A) and computations (C): Computations are either functions (A -> C) which take values and return computations, or base computations F A which wrap values in a "return" expression: C ::= A -> C | F A So, the return type of a function is wrapped by the F constructor. In particular, this distinguishes A1 -> A2 -> F A3 (a binary function) from A1 -> F (U (A2 -> F A3)), a unary function returning another unary function. (2) Moreover, we also distinguish partial and full applications: since a full application produces a result of type F A, we need to use the elimination form for F. Thus, after conversion to CBPV, we can distinguish syntactically between partial and full applications. Questions: Bibliography: Liu, Y. A., and Teitelbaum, T. Caching intermediate results for program improvement. In Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation (New York, NY, USA, 1995), PEPM '95, ACM, pp. 190—201. By Blaisorblade at 2014-09-09 15:27 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 7936 reads
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