6 ms·
Apologies, I was focused on the usual pairing in this space and not the more subtle one you're talking about. As others have pointed out, there isn't really sem
by Kambing 6mo ago
Apologies, I was focused on the usual pairing in this space and not the more subtle one you're talking about. As others have pointed out, there isn't really semantic a difference between the two. Both approaches to function parameters produce the same effect. The differences are purely in "implementation," either theoretically or in terms of systems-building.
From a theoretical perspective, a tuple expresses the idea of "many things" and a multi-argument parameter list expresses the idea of both "many things" and "function arguments." Thus, from a cleanliness perspective for your definitions, you may want to separate the two, i.e., require function have exactly one argument and then pass a tuple when multiple arguments are required. This theoretical cleanliness does result in concrete gains: writing down a formalism for single-argument functions is decidedly cleaner (in my opinion) than multi-argument functions and implementing a basic interpreter off of this formalism is, subsequently, easier.
From a systems perspective, there is a clear downside in this space. If tuples exist on the heap (as they do for most functional languages), you induce a heap allocation when you want to pass multiple arguments! This pitfall is evident with the semi-common beginner's mistake with OCaml algebraic datatype definitions where the programmer inadvertently wraps the constructor type with parentheses, thereby specifying a constructor of one-argument that is a tuple instead of a multi-argument constructor (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67079629/is-a-multiple-argument-constructor-ever-useful-over-a-single-tuple-argument-cons https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67079629/is-a-multiple-a... for more details).