Groovy, functional programming and the curry method

15 February 2008

Tags: curry functional groovy programming

I’m sure you have heard of functional programming, at least when you were sill a student (if you are, then you’re probably digging into it). The Groovy language, built on top of Java, provides means of dealing with functional programming. Moreover, it offers a curry method which allows powerful recursion mechanisms.

For example, in maths, you’ll want to define the sum function of a list as the sum of the first element and the (recursive) sum of the rest of the list. Going further, you’ll want to define a meta function which defines the behaviour of the sum method :

f(x1, x2, ...) = f(x1, f(x2, ...))

That’s currying. Here’s a basic example which demonstrates this feature in Groovy. First, let’s define a reduce closure which takes as the first argument the function to be applied on the list of arguments :

def reduce
reduce = { fn, params ->
    if (params.size()==1) return params[0]
 fn(params[0], reduce(fn,params[1..

Note that for the reduce function to be known inside the closure, you have to define it before (click here for details).

Then we may define the sum() function as this :

def sum = reduce.curry({ x,y -> x+y })

The sum method is a closure passed as a parameter to the curry method. Technically, it is equivalent to write a function where you replace the first parameter of the reduce closure with the sum closure. Now let’s see the result :

println sum((1..10))

--> 55

More interesting, as the parameter types are not specified, you may also use our sum function as a string or list concatenation :

println sum(("a".."z"))

--> abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

println sum([(1..10),(11..20)])

--> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]

I love Groovy ;)

Addendum: You should also use this with caution, as it costs much in invocation time, and you should not use it for so simple functions (summing is a very bad example as the cost in time of the sum operation is much less that the method invocation cost). Furthermore, don’t forget that it is recursions, so too many parameters will drive you too a stack overflow error ;-)