[jonlachlan]

Thanks everyone for the comments. It is interesting to see how widely "currying" is conflated with "partial application". I have to say, I still find the name to be a stumbling block. Perhaps this discussion can help to reverse that trend.

I have also learned a good deal more from these comments and further research. It seems my idea of "currying" was not entirely complete. Per the comment herein: "Currying turns polyadic function into a sequence of unary functions". Practically speaking, this means a curried function is a single-input function that will return a function which is still awaiting an argument, so that other functions can be added to the "currying chain".

I would call this "function sequencing". This term could be equally intuitive for functional languages (ML / Haskell) and non-functional languages alike. However, I think that non-functional language users will still appreciate an explanation that references "argument deferral", since this is one of the practical benefits, and is also the key part of the "functional" context-switch needed to understand the concept (i.e., you can compose functions without providing the arguments/inputs).

Is there an equivalent to "uncurrying"? (un-what-ing??) This verbiage sounds like we're trying to unpluck a chicken. On Wikipedia (the world's collective brain dump), we understand uncurrying to be "the dual transformation to currying, and can be seen as a form of defunctionalization." Crystal. I'll losely interpret this as flattening the unary (single-input) function sequence into one polyadic (multi-input) function. So can we refer to this as "function bundling"?

To summarize, I'm submitting "sequencing" and "bundling" as the two simple verbs that better describe "currying" and "uncurrying".

[dragonwriter]

> To summarize, I'm submitting "sequencing" and "bundling" as the two simple verbs that better describe "currying" and "uncurrying".

"Currying" and "uncurrying" are widely understood by programmers, and "sequencing" and "bundling" are often used in programming for other things, so your idea reduces clarity in favor of some aesthetic preference to avoid turning proper names into verbs when creating new technical terms.

So, I think we're better off just sticking with currying and uncurrying.

[jonlachlan]

Good thoughts. I'm interested to see if there are other opinions.

[jonlachlan]

As a related extension, though I don't think "partial application" is a bad term, I can also think of it as "presetting arguments", so there you go, my last submission is to call this "presetting".