currying

Pluralcurryings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of curry.

   He spent the afternoon currying favor with the new manager.

   The stable hands were currying the horses before the show began.

   Note

   One spelling, several unrelated trades: the -ing form covers seasoning food, grooming a horse with a curry comb, dressing tanned leather and thrashing someone. It also covers the figurative currying favor, whose object is favor itself. Like any gerund it can name the activity (the currying of horses). The programmer's verb has a separate origin and comes from the function-transforming technique, named for Haskell Curry.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A technique that turns a function taking several arguments into a series of functions, each taking just one argument.

   Currying transforms a two-argument addition function into two nested single-argument functions.

   Functional languages like Haskell rely on currying by default.

   Note

   An eponym worn down to lowercase: the technique is named for the American mathematician Haskell Curry. Each single-argument function returns the next, until the last one yields the result. The word works as a mass noun for the technique and as a count noun for one such transformation (two curryings of the same function). Its verb partner lets you say a function has been curried.

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