Re: 'your will' as sumti

[John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>]

David Barton wrote:

> Ashley Yakeley writes:
> 
>    I think this called 'currying' in functional calculus... anyone
>    care to comment?
> 
> Hmmm.  I don't think so.

Well, I do think so, sort of.  Remember that speaking Lojban is
logic programming, not functional programming.  Currying a function
is a rough analogue of partially instantiating a predicate term,
which is what "be...bei...be'o" does.

Thus "citka" in Prolog is "eat(X,Y)", a two-place predicate, whereas
"citka be lo rismi" is "eat(X,rice)", a one-place predicate.
(I suppose that if you give a second place to "citka be lo rismi",
you override the "lo rismi", as in Chinese, where the word
for "eat" has a default direct object of "rice".)

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban