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Showing posts from December, 2018

Simple Template Currying

Currying is the technique of transforming a function that takes multiple arguments in such a way that it can be called as a chain of functions, each with a single argument. I've discussed Currying on this blog previously in Fun With Lambdas C++14 Style and Dependently-Typed Curried printf . Both blogposts discuss currying of functions proper. I.e., they discuss how C++ can treat functions as values at runtime. However, currying is not limited to just functions. Types can also be curried---if they take type arguments. In C++, we call them templates. Templates are "functions" at type level. For example, passing two type arguments std::string and int to std::map gives std::map<std::string, int> . So std::map is a type-level function that takes two (type) arguments and gives another type as a result. They are also known as type constructors. So, the question today is: Can C++ templates be curried? As it turns out, they can be. Rather easily. So, here we go... #