[Rd] Curry: proposed new functional programming, er, function.

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Yike Lu <yikelu.home at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/25/12 5:23 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Yike Lu<yikelu.home at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> So here's the way I'm reading this:
>>>
>>> Original:
>>> curry_call is the function body you're constructing, which is itself just
>>> a
>>> one liner which calls the symbol FUN with the appropriate substitutions.
>>
>>
>> Yup.  With a bit more infrastructure you could probably modify it so
>> that multiple curries collapsed into the equivalent single curry.
>>
> Yes I could see how one would do that - if the match.call detects a Curry as
> the first function being called, we would short circuit the usual evaluation
> into a different path which properly collapses all the nesting.
>
> It's interesting how R offers these facilities to override the usual
> evaluation order, but if one does that too much it could easily become
> confusing. I was looking at Rpipe the other day
> (https://github.com/slycoder/Rpipe) and the way he implements it is by
> defining his own Eval.
>

The proto package does currying on proto methods by defining $.proto
appropriately:

library(proto)
p <- proto(a = 1, b = 2)

# same as ls(p) - output is c("a", "b")
p$ls()

Here ls() is _not_ a special proto method but is just the ordinary
ls() provided by R.  $.proto calls ls() sticking in p as the first
argument.  A proto object is an environment and ls with a first
argument that is an environment lists the names of the objects in that
environment.  Similarly:

p$as.list()
p$str()
p$parent.env()
p$print()
p$eapply(length)

are the same as as.list(p), str(p), parent.env(p), print(p) and
eapply(p, length).

Although this might seem like its just syntax in proto it does allow
one to override the method.  For example,

p2 <- proto(a = 1, b = 2, print = function(.) with(., cat("a:", a,
"b:", b, "\n")) )

p2$print() # uses p2's print

print(p2) # uses R's print

etc.

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