Hurry, curry!

Have you ever wondered why type signatures look the way they do? They seem intuitive for simple functions such as this:

Here we can see that aboveZero is a function which takes an Int and returns a Bool. Seems straightforward. Now look at this function:

Many will read this type signature in a different way compared the the easier definition we saw earlier. They might say that isBetween is a function which takes three Ints and returns a Bool. But if that's the case, why are we forced to write all those arrows? Especially considering arrows seemingly work both as a input separator and as a separator between inputs and outputs.

Actually, arrows only seperate one input value and a return value. The type signature for isBetween should be read as 'a function that takes an Intand returns a function that takes an Int and returns a function that takes an Int and returns Bool'. This is the same type signature, but written differently:

For esthetic reasons, Elm allow us to write the type signature without the parentheses.

The key thing to learn from this is that there is no such thing as a function taking multiple arguments. All functions take exactly one argument, and returns something else. That something else might be another function. This also means that when calling a function with more than one argument, it's not only valid to call it in the following way, it's also what conceptually happens:

This property of functions only taking one argument is known as currying, and is a defining feature of languages like Elm and Haskell. But why should you care about this? When is this knowledge ever useful?

That's what we'll explore in the coming days.