A Combinatory Rosetta Stone

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2024-04-19 16:00:07

In Combinatory Programming, we attempt to provide motivating examples for the various combinators identified as useful to everyday programmers.

The aim of that piece was to extract the basic concept of combinators from as much its context as possible, and present certain particularly useful combinators as higher-order functions callable inside of nearly any programming language, applicable to most styles of programming. In practice, of course, tacit forms—the style of programming that we can use combinator functions to achieve—are more at home in certain languages and certain contexts than others, and compose most nicely with other features of a programming environment: plentiful pure, first-class functions; partial application; and terse combinator syntax, among others.

In this supplement, we can dig deeper into some of those examples; where useful, expressing the same logic in multiple styles, and at times commenting on features of different styles or languages and the effects they produce.