Syntactic Difficulties

• Argument acquisition is verbose in Perl

        -- Haskell
        \x -> \_ -> x

        # Perl
        sub { my $x = shift; sub { $x } }

• This can make it painful to use higher-order functions

• One wants to return some simple thing like the K function above

• But the syntax makes it look worse than it is

  • At some point, it is not worth doing

  • This was a recurrent problem

• Related problem: no automatic currying

        -- Haskell
        \x _ -> x

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Copyright 2005 M. J. Dominus