Currying - Contrast With Partial Function Application

Contrast With Partial Function Application

Currying and partial function application are often conflated. The difference between the two is clearest for functions taking more than two arguments.

Given a function of type, currying produces . That is, while an evaluation of the first function might be represented as, evaluation of the curried function would be represented as, applying each argument in turn to a single-argument function returned by the previous invocation. Note that after calling, we are left with a function that takes a single argument and returns another function, not a function that takes two arguments.

In contrast, partial function application refers to the process of fixing a number of arguments to a function, producing another function of smaller arity. Given the definition of above, we might fix (or 'bind') the first argument, producing a function of type . Evaluation of this function might be represented as . Note that the result of partial function application in this case is a function that takes two arguments.

Intuitively, partial function application says "if you fix the first arguments of the function, you get a function of the remaining arguments". For example, if function div stands for the division operation x/y, then div with the parameter x fixed at 1 (i.e., div 1) is another function: the same as the function inv that returns the multiplicative inverse of its argument, defined by inv(y) = 1/y.

The practical motivation for partial application is that very often the functions obtained by supplying some but not all of the arguments to a function are useful; for example, many languages have a function or operator similar to plus_one. Partial application makes it easy to define these functions, for example by creating a function that represents the addition operator with 1 bound as its first argument.