© Thomas Mailund 2017

Thomas Mailund, Functional Programming in R, 10.1007/978-1-4842-2746-6_6

6. Point-Free Programming

Thomas Mailund

(1)Aarhus N, Denmark

In this last chapter we will not so much discuss actual programming but a programming style called point-free programming (not pointless programming), which is characterized by constructing functions through a composition of other functions and not by actually writing new functions.

A lot of computing can be expressed as the steps that data flow through and how data are transformed along the way. We write functions to handle all the most basic steps, the atoms of a program, and then construct functions for more complex operations by combining more fundamental transformations, building program ...

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