They are of some practical interest as well. I think David Turner was the first to use them in his SASL language [1]. When combined with a graph rewriting imple

They are of some practical interest as well. I think David Turner was the first to use them in his SASL language [1]. When combined with a graph rewriting implementation, combinators offer an excellent balance of simplicity and efficiency, as demonstrated in Ben Lynn's IOCCC-winning Haskell compiler [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SASL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SASL_(programming_language) [2] https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/compiler/ioccc.html https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/compiler/ioccc.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(programming_language)