Introduce pseudovariadic functions.

This commit is contained in:
Sergiu Ivanov 2022-03-20 19:34:48 +01:00
parent 1f281d3851
commit 8b838c0b22

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@ -18,7 +18,37 @@ Boolean functions, etc.).
[sandbox-memory-limit 50])
(make-evaluator 'typed/racket #:requires '((submod "functions.rkt" typed)))))
@section{Tabulating functions}
@section{Pseudovariadic functions}
Functions for @seclink["tabulating"]{tabulating functions} take as an argument
a function to tabulate or a list of functions to tabulate. Writing the type of
such functions in Typed Racket and generalizing on the number of the arguments
is hard, and using functions with such types seems even harder.
The @seclink["tabulating"]{following section} contains some examples,
illustrating among other things the difficulties of typing
tabulating functions.
The type of @racket[apply] does not help in this situation, because Typed
Racket treats @racket[apply] in
@hyperlink["https://racket.discourse.group/t/replicating-the-type-of-apply/770/3"]{a
special way}. This means that a user-defined function with the same type as
@racket[apply] and directly calling it will not work in the same way.
@examples[#:eval functions-evaluator
apply
(define myapply apply)
myapply
(apply (λ (x y) (and x y)) '(#t #f))
(eval:error (myapply (λ (x y) (and x y)) '(#t #f)))
]
One way to work around this issue is to write functions which disguise as
variadic functions of type @racket[(-> a * b)], but which throw an exception
when they receive a number of arguments different from a given constant value.
Such functions are called @italic{pseudovariadic functions} in
this documentation.
@section[#:tag "tabulating"]{Tabulating functions}
@defproc[(tabulate [func (-> a ... b)]
[doms (List (Listof a) ... a)])