Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Brian McNamara!]

j-anthony at rcn.com (Jon S. Anthony) once said:
>gt5163b at prism.gatech.edu (Brian McNamara!) writes:
>
>> boost::tuple to then generalize things.  (Indeed, using such libraries,
>> you can simulate "apply" rather convincingly.  But somewhere under the
>> hood, someone has to have written N different overloads for 0-arg,
>> 1-arg, ... N-arg, up to some fixed ("large enough") N.)
>
>That's not actually good enough.  You also have to have overloads for
>all the possible types for 1-arg, ..., N-arg.  Actually it's worse
>than that - the set of types is not closed, so even in principle this
>won't work.

I'm not sure I understand you, but if I do, then "templates" take care
of this.  That is, we'd write (e.g. for the 3-arg case):

   template <class A, class B, class C>
   Result someFunc( A a, B b, C c ); // fudging "Result" for simplicity

which means that someFunc works "forall" types A, B, and C.

-- 
 Brian M. McNamara   lorgon at acm.org  :  I am a parsing fool!
   ** Reduce - Reuse - Recycle **    :  (Where's my medication? ;) )