On 12/11/2019 16:29, Jonathan Gilbert wrote:

On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 4:45 AM Philip Oakley [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 12/11/2019 04:49, Jonathan Gilbert wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 4:59 PM Philip Oakley [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

sounds like "Currying" a function but with the parameters taken in any
order, though, in a sense, perhaps not generating intermediate functions...

It's like currying if you could pass g(x) = f(x, y) to one block of
code and h(y) = f(x, y) to another block of code, so that each of g
and h are each like curried versions of f that "bake in" one of the
arguments, without having to know which one will get called first. :-)

Jonathan Gilbert

So that would be called "Chording"...
(Is there a 'proper' technical term for that approach?)

Not an entirely implausible term :-) The only other implementation
I've ever seen was Microsoft's "Polyphonic C#", which got rolled into
C-omega. I'm pretty sure, though, that it was never referred to as
something you _do to_ a function, but rather as a _different type_ of
function -- as in, the function hasn't been "chorded", it "is a
chord". Very little literature one way or the other though, and this
is the first actual, live use case for the structure I've encountered
in my years of programming :-)

A little bit of late follow up ;-)

The basic ideas that are embedded in "chording" would appear to be the 
same as those used in Data Flow Diagrams and the older attempts at data 
flow based machines such as the Transputer and it's message passing, and 
out of order execution machines. See 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_architecture etc.

It just looks like it's now moved to the compiler, or JIT (just-in-time) 
compilation, which appears to be the same thing with different branding!

Philip